Savannah's Innovative Educators: Lila Cabaniss

Lila Cabaniss is the third woman educator in this series. She was born in  1874 in Savannah, Georgia. This would make her a contemporary of Ramona Riley, Nina Pape and Juliette Gordon Low. Unlike Pape and Riley Cabaniss was an artist of some accomplishments. She would be a co-founder of the Savannah Art Club which had ties with the Telfair Academy. This organization which still exists today as the Savannah Art Association has as its mission ‘To develop and encourage local artists at all levels to study the arts and to provide opportunities to exhibit their works.’ She was an ardent supporter of the Telfair Academy.

She traveled to New York where she studied at the Art Students League, Columbia and Syracuse Universities. She widely exhibited her work at such venues as the Corcoran Gallery in Washington DC and The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. She later exhibited with the Southern States Art League of which she was a member.

It was in 1915 that she made her first contribution to the Savannah education system by starting the first art classes in the public schools. Art appreciation classes were ending in most of America in the 1920s. But Cabaniss knew the value of practicing art and through force of will helped the Savannah education system adopt art classes for their schools. For her efforts she became the first full-time art teacher in the public art schools in 1927.

​The other significant contribution to the art programs of the public schools was through her Telfair Academy connections: she started the annual visit to the Academy to see the Telfair’s art collection and exhibitions. Today every fourth grader in the public schools travels to the Telfair Academy for programs designed specifically for them.  This program benefits thousands of public schools a year. The program this year celebrates one hundred years of the partnership of the Telfair Academy and public schools to teach art to the children of Savannah. Cabaniss not only was a gifted artist but she gifted art to the children of Savannah. She died in 1969 and is buried in Laurel Grove Cemetery (North).
 

 

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