Barn Star Paintings of Frances W. Barr Kremp (1899-1972)

Born Frances Willard Barr to Harry H. and Carrie Barr on September 14, 1899, she graduated in 1917 from Reading High School for Girls where she served as class secretary. Even in her early life she was Interested in art and painting, and her yearbook details her love of tennis, basketball and “splashing paint around” with further expectations of becoming an interior designer. Post graduation she attended the Pennsylvania Museum School of Industrial Art (later renamed to the Philadelphia Museum College of Art) where she graduated in 1921 and went on to teach in the Reading Public School district as an art teacher for thirty-five years. During this period, she married Robert Bensberg Kremp and had no children together as far as records show. Kremp began to travel the state of Pennsylvania to document the barn stars of the Pennsylvania Dutch, commonly referred to as Hex Signs in tourist literature. Over the course of roughly thirty years Kremp recreated and preserved around forty-five different barn stars primarily from Berks and Lehigh through watercolor and sketch mediums. These paintings and sketches were featured in exhibitions at the Landis Valley Museum and the William Penn Memorial Museum. These exhibitions aimed to educate the public on the diversity of the region’s distinctive star patterns, and the history of the artistic tradition. Kremp helped to reinforce the traditional legacy of the stars in the region and their connection to the local culture and people. Frances Barr Kremp passed away April 8, 1972, only a year before the exhibitions introduced her work to the Pennsylvania Dutch community and the public. These paintings were eventually stored by the Hex Tour Association, a tourist bureau promoting exploration of the Berks County countryside, and only recently resurfaced for public access.