Miriam Beerman

Beerman was born in Providence, Rhode Island. She later studied painting under John Frazier at the Rhode Island School for Design and earned her BFA.[1] After earning her degree, she studied with various established artists including Yasuo Kuniyoshi at the Art Students League in NYC, with Adja Yunkers at the New School for Social Research in NYC, and Stanley William Hayter at Atelier 17 in Paris, France.[2]

Although Beerman maintains the gestural brushstrokes of the abstract expressionists, her work focuses on bestial characters who convey the intense emotion found in her images. Her work includes automatic gestures, vivid colors, and stippled textures that help evoke the feeling of devastation. Some of her themes include biblical plagues, the Holocaust, Hiroshima, and nuclear threat.[3]

The breadth of Beerman's career is evident through her grants, awards, and exhibitions list. They 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).[4]

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.[5] 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.[6] Her work is in the collection of The Newark Museum of Art[7] and her work now resides in over 60 museums.[8]

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. The images are rough, humorous and tragic, echoing the artist's humanistic concerns.[9]

Beerman received awards and honors from Pollock Krasner Foundation,[10] Joan Mitchell Foundation[11] and more. She also received an alumni award from Rhode Island School of Design in 2015.[12] In 2015 Beerman had a collage retrospective at Lawrence University.[13] Miriam Beerman, Expressing the Chaos, a film by Jonathan Gruber, was also released in 2015. The film was shown on PBS and on Dutch and New Zealand T.V.[14]