Olinka Hrdy

Olinka Hrdy (1902 - 1987) was a female artist who was born in Prague, Oklahoma Territory and became a noted artist in Oklahoma. She graduated in 1928, from the University of Oklahoma (OU), where she majored in art. Her teachers included Oscar Jacobsen and Edith Mahier, who considered her one of their most gifted students. She earned part of the money for her education by painting murals for a restaurant in Norman, Oklahoma and a set of panels in the women's dormitory at OU.

Noted Oklahoma-born architect, Bruce Goff, discovered Hrdy's artistic talent one day while eating lunch at the OU women's dormitory and asked to meet the artist. They became friends and quickly began to collaborate, as he invited her to paint some murals for the Riverside Studio in Tulsa, which he was designing for a Tulsa musician. After that, he commissioned her to help decorate the Brady Theater in Tulsa (then known as the Tulsa Convention Hall). Her works at both sites have since disappeared.

Hardy moved to New York City for awhile in the 1930s, where she applied her artistic talent in designing utilitarian objects like place mats, textiles, radios, wallpaper and even scarves. She was then invited to attend Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesen Studio in Wisconsin, but ended her visit there after three months.

She moved to Southern California and worked for awhile at the start of World War II, but quit her job and opened her own design studio. During this period, she also experienced a brief marriage that apparently ended in divorce. Later, she returned to live in her mother's home in Prague, where she died in 1987.