Mira Lehr, Pioneering Miami Beach Artist, Dies at 88

The South Florida artwork scene has misplaced an enormous. Mira Lehr, painter and founding father of the influential Continuum artwork area, has died. She was 88.

A assertion posted to Lehr’s Instagram confirmed the information on January 24. “Our heartfelt ideas are along with her kids, grandchildren, and her complete household. She was an artwork pioneer, celebrated as ‘the godmother of Miami’s artwork scene.’ Her life, legacy, and groundbreaking paintings will proceed to encourage us,” learn the publish. A reason for dying was not given.

Lehr was recognized for her “eco-feminist” fashion, influenced by midcentury abstraction and environmental issues particular to South Florida. She tried to lift consciousness of the ecological affect of human exercise on the distinctive land and oceanscapes of Biscayne Bay and the Everglades. She is greatest recognized for her use of resin on Japanese washi paper to create colourful, shiny abstractions of flowers, crops, and different organic kinds, in addition to her set up “Tracing the Red Thread,” which depicted Florida’s native mangrove forests as a climate-change metaphor, their tangled roots a maze for misplaced humanity.

Born in 1934 to a Jewish household in Brooklyn, Lehr was raised in Miami Beach when town was nonetheless formally segregated. In a 2019 interview with New Times, she recalled encountering every day anti-Semitism, strolling to highschool previous indicators that mentioned “No Dogs, No Jews.” She finally left Florida to attend faculty at Vassar College in upstate New York, the place she acquired a level in artwork historical past, then continued to New York City through the heyday of summary expressionism. She rented a studio at Carnegie Hall, studied on the Hans Hofmann School, and socialized with the likes of Joan Mitchell and Robert Motherwell.

In 1960, she moved again to Miami Beach, the place her husband had accepted a job at a hospital. Becoming uncomfortable with the nonexistent Miami artwork scene and conformist attitudes on the town, Lehr and a bunch of girls began Continuum Gallery in 1961, one of many first artwork areas of its type in South Florida. Though the area lasted into the Nineteen Nineties and introduced in world-famous inventive minds resembling R. Buckminster Fuller, Lehr put her inventive profession did not take off till a lot later in her life on account of her elevating a household.

But it did take off.

Like different feminine artists resembling Yayoi Kusama and Luchita Hurtado, who discovered success late in life, Lehr got here to wider consideration after she had already reached outdated age. In the final decade of her life particularly, she started to exhibit extensively, with solo museum reveals all through Florida on the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami, the Bass Museum, Fairchild Botanical Gardens, the Deering Estate, the Mennello Museum of Art in Orlando, and, most poetically, the Jewish Museum of Florida, housed in a former synagogue on South Beach she as soon as lived close by. Her work has made it into museum collections worldwide, together with the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Smithsonian Museum of American Art in Washington, D.C., the Getty Center in Los Angeles, and plenty of of Miami’s establishments.

According to her Instagram account, info on additional preparations following Lehr’s dying shall be obtainable quickly.

Correction: A earlier model of this text acknowledged Mira Lehr’s died on the age of 93. Her age on the time of her dying was 88. We remorse the error.