Born in Gonzalez, Texas, Leola Freeman was reared in El Paso and attended Georgetown Convent, Washington D.C. She studied afterward at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, under Daniel Garber, Joseph Thurmond Pearson, Jr. Henry Bainbridge McCarter, and George Brant Bridgman.

Freeman moved from El Paso to Richmond, Virginia, after marrying Lloyd Freeman, then moved to Philadelphia where she and her husband shared a studio. In 1933, after his death she returned to El Paso with her four young children and set out to earn a living as a painter. She married Michael McElroy, an Irish watercolorist, in the early 1940’s.

For several years Freeman maintained a studio in the Paso del Norte Hotel where she exhibited...