‘Godmother of Miami’s artwork scene’, Mira Lehr, has died aged 88

The eco-feminist artist Mira Lehr, “godmother of Miami’s artwork scene” and co-founder of the Continuum girls’s co-operative in that metropolis, has died, aged 88.

Lehr moved to Miami from New York in 1960 and began to exhibit within the mid-Nineteen Eighties. She gained new recognition within the 2000s, when her works had been purchased by main US non-public collectors, museums, hospitals and the US State Division (for embassy collections). The Metropolitan Museum of Artwork in New York acquired three of her prints—Fluorescent (2019), and Ghost Forest I and Ghost Forest II (2021)—in September 2022.

Lehr additionally broke new creative floor in her seventies, making large-scale set up items, and hanging works on canvas on nature-based themes, impressed by the flora and shoreline of her Miami Seashore house, utilizing Japanese paper, inks, gunpowder, fireplace and fuses. The usage of gunpowder was impressed by visiting a 2008 retrospective of the New York-based Chinese language artist Cai Guo Qiang on the Guggenheim. In these late items, Lehr used a blowtorch to scorch items of thick Japanese paper, which she then bathed in colored inks, earlier than, as a final touch, inserting gunpowder and fuses on the canvas and lighting them to burn plant-like results into the image’s floor. “It’s harmful and it’s thrilling,” she stated when interviewed for Mira Lehr. Arc of Nature. The whole monograph (2022). “It’s what my work is all about: magnificence and its opposites, hazard and destruction.”

In her 2020 exhibition Excessive Water Mark, on the Mennello Museum of American Artwork, in Orlando, devoted to the specter of local weather change to oceans and shoreline, Lehr offered her message utilizing video, work and sculpture, together with the large-scale set up Mangrove Labyrinth, constructed from rope and iron rods, and a room-sized exposition on the destiny of coral. “There’s a type of chain response with coral,” she informed the New York Instances. “One goes they usually all go. That might occur to our cities. We have to work collectively to avoid wasting them.”

She was born Myra Tager, in Brooklyn, the daughter of Charles I. Tager, a profitable workplace items producer, and Pauline (Pearl) Goodstein. Myra’s mother and father took the household to Miami Seashore every winter, and moved there completely in 1942. After graduating in artwork historical past from Vassar Faculty, New York State—the place she modified her first title to Mira and was taught by the feminist artwork historian Linda Nochlin—Mira married David E. Lehr, then a health care provider within the Military Medical Corps, and did postgraduate work on the Boston Museum Faculty whereas he skilled in cardiology. Once they moved to New York Metropolis the next yr, Mira studied on the Museum of Trendy Artwork and began to delve on the earth of Summary Expressionism. She studied with James Brooks, Ludwig Sander, and Robert Motherwell, and met Joan Mitchell, Lee Krasner, Louise Bourgeois and Helen Frankenthaler.

Mira and David Lehr moved to Miami with their younger household in 1960. “It was a cultural desert”, Mira informed The Artwork Newspaper in 2019. “However there has all the time been a core group of gifted, dedicated artists, creating vital work regardless of the numerous challenges. Little by little, the town improved, particularly with the arrival of Artwork Basel in Miami Seashore [in 2002].”

A central pillar to that change was an artists’ group, latterly often known as Continuum, which was co-founded by Lehr in 1961. It was designed to open up alternatives for ladies artists and to create an artwork neighborhood in Miami. “Ladies artists had a really laborious time right here,” Lehr informed The Artwork Newspaper in 2019. “They weren’t recognised as artists—some even dismissed them as ‘dilettantes’. If a girl artist acquired married and had kids, they had been much more ignored.”

Lehr and her fellow collective members began by assembly in one another’s houses, and following the teachings of the influential Summary Expressionist artist and trainer Hans Hofmann (1880-1966), who Lehr had met in New York. The wife-and-husband group of Nieves and James Billmyer, who had studied with Hofmann for greater than 10 years, held annual winter workshops in Miami for Lehr and her circle. The primary group exhibition was held in a rented house above a bar, and the primary Continuum Gallery house opened within the Seventies.

Continuum ran for over 30 years and blossomed with visits from Lehr’s New York contacts, together with the New York-based artist and vendor Betty Parsons. “Betty juried a nationwide present for Continuum and stayed at my home, the place we had many lengthy discussions about artwork,” Lehr informed The Artwork Newspaper. “She was the one who satisfied me to take my portray off the easel and transcend.”

Motherwell and Frankenthaler, who had married in 1958, got here to Miami within the winter of 1962. Motherwell ran a course on the College of Miami and lectured to the Continuum group. “I favored him,” Lehr stated. “We acquired alongside. He was enjoyable to speak to. He critiqued my work and we talked about philosophy, existentialism.”

In 1969, the visionary architect Buckminster Fuller invited Lehr to New York to work on World Sport, a six-week summer time programme by which scientists, historians, architects, engineers and poets explored methods to make the world extra sustainable, cut back poverty and enhance productiveness. It was a transformative expertise. “Bucky acquired me pondering in positives,” Lehr says in Arc of Nature, “the best way to remedy issues, not simply get caught on how dangerous issues are. I’m much more optimistic now. And I attempt to get that into my work, that the issues with the surroundings are usually not hopeless.”

Simply over 60 years after Lehr moved completely to Florida, and 20 years after the arrival of Artwork Basel in Miami Seashore, an exhibition of her new work at Rosenbaum Up to date in Boca Raton (November 2022—January 2023) marked the publication of Mira Lehr. Arc of Nature. The whole monograph, an replace to a monograph revealed for a 2015 retrospective on the similar gallery. She additionally featured in two different exhibitions working concurrently with Artwork Basel in Miami Seashore 2022: The Miami Inventive Motion at the Heart for Visible Communication in Miami’s Wynwood district (till 15 March) and Fragile Magnificence: Environmental Artwork, on the Jewish Museum of Florida-FIU in South Seashore, which featured ten of her sculptures.

Requested about the way forward for her house metropolis in 2019, she stated: “We’re at sea degree, and water continues to rise. We should develop into extra proactive and work collectively to guard the planet earlier than it’s too late and earlier than there’s no turning again. The time is now.”Myra (Mira) Bella Tager; born Brooklyn, New York Metropolis 1934; married David Lehr (died 1996; two daughters, two sons); died 24 January 2023

‘Miami was a cultural desert in 1960’: a 2019 interview with Mira Lehr