Miriam Beerman

Miriam Beerman (November 15, 1923 – February 2022) was an American abstract expressionist painter and printmaker.[1] She was born in Providence, Rhode Island on November 15, 1923, and died in February 2022, at the age of 98.[2]

Miriam Beerman studied painting under John Frazier at the Rhode Island School for Design and earned her BFA.[3] After earning her degree, she studied with various established artists including Yasuo Kuniyoshi at the Art Students League in NYC, Adja Yunkers at the New School for Social Research in NYC, and Stanley William Hayter at Atelier 17 in Paris, France.[4]

Beerman maintained the gestural brushstrokes of abstract expressionism, and often centered her pieces on human or animal forms. Her work includes automatic gestures, vivid colors, and stippled textures. In an artist's statement, she explained that her work is a response to her perception of a sense of brutality, devastation, and chaos in the world around her.[5] She drew specific inspiration from biblical plagues, The Holocaust, and the Atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.[6]

She was the first woman to ever have a solo exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum and has since had 31 solo exhibitions of her work.[7] Her work has been exhibited globally, including at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, NY, and at the Montclair Art Museum in Montclair, New Jersey.[8] Her work is in the collection of The Newark Museum of Art,[9] and her work may be seen in over 60 museums.

In 2000, Beerman was an Artist's Book Resident at the Women's Studio Workshop in Rosendale, New York. During her residency, Beerman published Faces, a limited-edition portfolio of eight drypoint prints with text from The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge by Rainer Maria Rilke.[10]

The artist's work was explored in a 2015 documentary film directed by Jonathan Gruber: Miriam Beerman: Expressing the Chaos.[11] The film was shown on PBS and on Dutch and New Zealand T.V.[12]

After she died in 2022, the retrospective exhibition, Miriam Beerman: 1923–2022 Nothing has changed, was held at the Rechnitz Hall DiMattio Gallery in West Long Branch and included twenty large-scale paintings by the late artist.[13]

Beerman received numerous grants and awards throughout her career. These include a CAPS grant from New York State Council on the Arts (1971), the Childe Hassam Purchase Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1977), the Camargo Foundation Award (1980), a distinguished artist grant from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts (1987), and a 40-year retrospective of her work, held at the State Museum of New Jersey in Trenton (1991).[14]

Beerman received awards and honors from the Pollock Krasner[15] and Joan Mitchell[16] foundations, among others. She also received an alumni award from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2015.[17]

In 2015, she had a collage retrospective at Lawrence University.[18]

• Miriam Beerman papers, circa 1930-2006, via the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution