James Yarosh Associates Fine Art Gallery Presents
MIRIAM BEERMAN | SHEBA SHARROW
her story: Revisiting Women Artists of the 20th Century
MIRIAM BEERMAN | SHEBA SHARROW: HER STORY - CURRENTLY ON VIEW THROUGH JANUARY 20th, 2025
INVITATIONAL SALON EVENINGS BY APPOINTMENT: Limited attendance | Contact for availability
ART ON PAPER 2024: September 5-8th
GALLERY SALON 2024 BY INVITATION EVENT: September 21, - (Details to follow)
Holmdel, N.J. – James Yarosh Associates Fine Art Gallery is pleased to announce the duo exhibition MIRIAM BEERMAN / SHEBA SHARROW – HER STORY: Revisiting Women Artists of the 20th Century. Opening April 6, the exhibition activates a dialogue between two great female humanistic expressionists of the last century.
Building upon recent guest curator roles with Monmouth University and a showing at Art on Paper in New York City, Yarosh continues to advocate for great women artists. HER STORY prompts an exploration of Miriam Beerman and Sheba Sharrow, both of whom bore witness to the profound human struggles of the mid-to-late 20th century.
“My passion for curatorial activism led me to explore the pairing of these two pioneering artists,” says gallerist and curator James Yarosh, “When viewed together, their works resonate viscerally. Individual in their styles, both used their artistic voices unapologetically. Together, they lift one another up, each illuminating the beauty and strength of the other.”
“Sharrow has an ability to transmute serious subject matter with urgent markings, creating charged pieces that prove beauty lives eternal, even in darkness,” Yarosh continues. “Through a vigorous and poetic hand, her work reflects on brutality and simultaneously pays homage to the animating power of solidarity, warning the viewer: remember, history’s tragedies repeat.”
“Beerman’s globally resonant works give voice and witness to persecution with a fearless strength. Her created worlds spotlight the horrors perpetrated by men, demonstrate a special sensitivity to the natural world, and call for humans to acknowledge their responsibility to all living things. As a gifted colorist, her work connects on an almost primal level.”
HER STORY will be on view at 45 East Main Street (Rt.520) in Historic Holmdel Village, New Jersey. The exhibition will run through January 20th, 2025.
MIRIAM BEERMAN, Untitled, 1969, 67in x 54in, oil on canvas
MIRIAM BEERMAN (1923–2022)
Born in 1923 in Providence, Rhode Island, Miriam Beerman studied painting at the Rhode Island School of Design and went on to spend two years in France as Fulbright Scholar. Beerman was a pioneer, and in 1971 became one of the first women to be given a one-person show at the Brooklyn Museum. When Beerman passed away in February 2022 at 98, she left a six-decade legacy of works that are included in the permanent collections of over 60 museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Phillips Collection, The National Gallery of Art, and The Victoria and Albert Museum.
MIRIAM BEERMAN: EXPRESSING THE CHAOS - ARTIST DOCUMENTARYMIRIMA BEERMAN: 1923-2022 NOTHING HAS CHANGED EXHIBIT AT MONMOUTH UNIVERSITY CATALOG
"Young Painter in her Greenwich Village studio, 1947, gelatin silver print - Berenice Abbott
MIRIAM BEERMAN: MUSEUM COLLECTIONS NOW ON VIEW
NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY D.C.
MIRIAM BEERMAN,"Self Portrait", 1950, woodblock on view now
RECENT ACQUISITIONS EXHIBIT NOVEMBER 3, 2023 - OCTOBER 27, 2024
The latest iteration of this annual display focuses exclusively on portraits representing women or made by women.
MIRIAM BEERMAN: NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY EXHIBIT LINK
NATIONAL GALLERYOF ART D.C.
THE ANXIOUS EYE: GERMAN EXPRESSIONISM AND ITS LEGACY EXHBIT FEBRUARY 11, 2024 - MAY 27, 2024 The Anxious Eye: German Expressionism and Its Legacy presents insights into the work of these innovative, early 20th-century artists and their continuing impact a century later. Two of Miriam Beermans' works are included.
THE ANXIOUS EYE: GERMAN EXPRESSIONISM AND ITS LEGACY EXHIBIT LINK
MIRIAM BEERMAN: SELECT PAST EXHIBITIONS
THE NEW MUSEUM
THE DECADE SHOW: FRAMEWORKS OF THE IDENTITY IN THE 1980's EXHIBIT MAY 12 - AUGUST 19, 1990 GROUP SHOW WITH ARTISTS INCLUDING JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT, LEON GOLUB, GUERILLA GIRLS, and NANCY SPERO, AMONG OTHERS. "In an unprecedented collaborative effort, The New Museum, The Museum of Contemporary Hispanic Art, and The Studio Museum in Harlem organized a multidisciplinary exhibition of the art and issues of the 1980’s. The Decade Show: Frameworks of Identity in the 1980’s brought together more than 200 works by ninety-four artists of Hispanic, Asian, African-American, Native American, and European heritage. The exhibition was issues oriented, rather than a stylistic overview, focusing on the important concerns of the 1980s as they relate to the idea of identity.
THE NEW MUSEUM: THE DECADES SHOW: FRAMEWORKS OF IDENTITY IN THE 1980's
GRAHAM GALLERY - Madison Avenue. 78th st.
MIRIAM BEERMAN AND ALICE NEEL - TWO PERSON GALLERY EXHIBIT - FALL, 1977 Oils and ink washes of grotesque, anthropomorphic animal faces by the former; paintings of people by the latter.
THE NEW YORK TIMES: ARTS AND LEISURE GUIDE
BROOKLYN MUSEUM NYC ENDURING BEASTS: DRAWINGS AND PAINTINGS BY MIRIAM BEERMAN November 11, 1971 - January 2, 1972
(Miriam Beerman, one of the first women to have a one-person show at the Brooklyn Museum) The primal bonds between man and beast is the dominant theme of THE ENDURING BEAST, an exhibition of drawings and paintings by Miriam Beerman In her work, whose subjects include lizards, bats, tortoises, monkeys and the lower primates, the artist explores the similarities of facial and bodily expression between man and beast, often finding them interchangeable.
ENDURING BEASTS EXHIBIT LINK
RAGE THE COLOR OF LOVE - Miriam Beerman exibit: Bergen Museum of Art and Science, Paramus, NJ - Exhibit review: Vivien Raynor, The New York Times
In 1971, she became (one of) the first woman to exhibit alone in the Brooklyn Museum, and since then she has had more than a dozen solo shows in Manhattan as well as in New Jersey. To judge from the aforementioned retrospective, there was a time when she seemed very much a part of the postwar figurative movement, which flourished until the scene was pre-empted by Abstract Expressionism. Although the balance of power has since been reversed, Ms. Beerman, now in her early 70's, stands apart as an Expressionist, making most Neo-Expressionists seem frivolous but commanding the respect and admiration of younger representational painters, many of whom have been her students. She has received numerous awards, including one from the Joan Mitchell Foundation in 1994.
The Bergen Museum pays tribute to the artist by singling her out as one of the state's most influential contemporary artists, but the shoe may well be on the other foot. Her art is not easy to like, but such is the force of its impact, the place may never be the same again.
THE NEW YORK TIMES REVIEW: Redemption Through Pain, Solitary or Shared
RUTGERS UNIVERSITY, NEWARK - PAUL ROBESON GALLERIES
THE FIGURE, 5 ASPECTS: THE BRUTAL FIGURE – VISCERAL IMAGES - November 13, 1986 - December 19, 1986 The works in this exhibition share a vision of a ghostly and anguished nature. All of the artists address the visceral side of the world; none of the works placate the viewer nor allow for a reprieve from the concerns of the artists. The works unsettle and overpower; the impact of the work is both personal, worldly and long lasting.This exhibition is the second in the series The Figure, 5 Aspects. Includesthe work of Miriam Beerman, Ante Bozanich, Beverly Fishman, Danita Geltner, Reuben Kadish, Pier Marton, Thomas Micchelli, Gregoire Muller, and Charlemagne Palestine.This exhibition is accompanied by a catalog with contributions by Alison Weld
THE BRUTAL FIGURE – VISCERAL IMAGES EXHIBIT LINK
"Beerman's paintings are containers of memory--historic, monumental and personal. Beerman is a painter whose works throughout her life have addressed issues of persecution. I believe her painting indicates she is a soulmate of Soutine as well as Goya, Van Gogh and Francis Bacon. No artist dies completely."
ALISON G. WELD, Curator for the 1991 exhbition: Miriam Beerman: Works from 1949 to 1990 - New Jersey Museum, Trenton
Sheba Sharrow’s expressionist paintings are masterful and refined, engaging us with mortality and desire, vulnerability and power, warfare and spirituality. Her figurative paintings bear witness to human suffering, struggle and liberation.
Born in Brooklyn in 1926 to Russian-Jewish immigrant parents and raised in Chicago, Sharrow was a child of the Great Depression and World War II, a participant in the social justice movements of the 1960s and ’70s and saw the bloody roads walked for civil rights and the damages wrought by wars. She earned her BFA at the Art Institute of Chicago, studying with Boris Anisfeld and Joseph Hirsch. She continued her studies at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and earned an MFA at the Tyler School of the Arts at Temple University.
She has been considered part of the “Chicago School” of imagist painters. Through a vigorous and poetic hand, her work reflects on brutality and simultaneously pays homage to the animating power of solidarity, warning us: Remember, history’s tragedies repeat.
SHEBA SHARROW: ART ON PAPER 2021 - A GALLERIST’S SHARED FINE ART CONVERSATIONSHEBA SHARROW: 2017 BALANCING ACT EXHIBIT AT MONMOUTH UNIVERSITY CATALOG
SHEBA SHARROW, Don't look now, 2001, 56" x 89", acrylic on canvas
SHEBA SHARROW (1926–2006)
"Sheba Sharrow's disturbing evocations...link her sensibility to German Expressionism, yet the sensual refinement of her surfaces and the rich literary and historical resonances of her imagery connect her to the romantic-historic tradition of Turner or Ryder..adding up to a despairing view of the world relieved only by beauty (and) her brilliant command of the human form."
AMY FINE COLLINS, Art in America
"Ms. Sharrow paints with a heavy heart and a firm hand. Her emotive images possess seductively beautiful layered surfaces while their content conveys a profound sense of soul-searching...she deserves the kind of recognition enjoyed by such other neo-Expressionist artists such as Joan Snyder or Leon Golub."
FRED B. ADELSON, The New York Times
"These works disturb through their content and seduce through their formal rigor...I see Sheba Sharrow the artist in the company of Rembrandt, Goya, Kollwitz, Beckman and Orozco all clear-eyed humanists... (her) figuration is neither sentimental nor illustrative...her art is knowledge at the service of emotions, and these are noble: indignation and compassion."
ALEJANDRO ANREUS, PhD
"As Sharrow demonstrates through all of her paintings, to partake in the act of creating is to raise a hand against forces of destruction. And like the phoenix rising from the ashes, so the beauty of her work transcends the horrors to which she has borne witness."
THERESA GRUPICO, PhD
"Sharrow labored among the long tradition of artists who recorded and critiqued the conditions of their times, often choosing to do so toward the aim of creating a greater humanity."
COREY DZENKO, PhD
"The knowledge of the Holocaust darkens all aspects of experience...(Sharrow)...is wholly original in her relentless struggle to bring forth through paint, through collage, through poetry and numbers, through slash and drip and erasure, the central event of the 20th century."
MICHAEL WATERS, PhD
I FIRST MET SHEBA SHARROW at an artist’s colony in Virgina in 1984. From the beginning, I was conscious of an artistic spirit kindred to my own. I saw drawing and painting based on humanistic themes and powerful myths. She spoke often of political ideas which motivated her. “We are destroying one another ...life is on the brink of extinction and we are obliged to comment on the state of society.” Sharrow mentioned often that she did not see art as entertainment and although her drawing and painting skills are brilliantly seductive, her work tends to stir the conscience and remind us of our fragile existence.
Sharrow the painter is also a poet. Even though her poetry is in visual form it seems natural to think of these works as poetic. The melancholy skulls of the beaten warriors, like her other images, are desperate glimpses of the past. These floating forms, a disembodied hand or foot, a wagon, a shrine ....are the painful memories. Her work pleads with us and there is a tenderness in the pleading.
I am happy to present this exhibition to the students and the staff of Montclair State College. I know that the students will learn a great deal about drawing from seeing these amazing works and the public in general will have been introduced to one of the finest women artists of our time.
MIRIAM BEERMAN Curator of exhibition Professor of Art, Montclair State College
JAMES YAROSH ASSOCIATES FINE ART AND INTERIOR DESIGN GALLERY SALON CONVERSATIONS – A VIDEO RECORDING
This video documents a recent evening of conversation as part of a gallery salon event with a special focus on three artists: Miriam Beerman, Robert Melee and Sheba Sharrow. Thank you to my fellow speakers, Heather Barone (Mentee and former assistant to artist Miriam Beerman), Robert Melee (Artist), Mayda Sharrow (Trustee of the estate of Sheba Sharrow and the artist's daughter),and client/art collector guests who joined us as we shared stories, ideas of gallery curation, backgrounds on the artists and insights on the artworks featured in our 2023 exhibit.
VIDEO RECORDING: FINE ART CONVERSATIONS/ FIVE ARTISTS | RECEPTION CONVERSATION LINK
James Yarosh Associates Fine Art Gallery
The James Yarosh Associates Fine Art Gallery, located one hour outside of Manhattan in Holmdel, New Jersey, was established in 1996 and remains loyal to representing fine art, curating gallery collections, and thoughtfully presenting art and interior design specifications through an artist’s vision and understanding. Yarosh has received national acclaim for presenting Russian fine art collections and recognizing significant art movements in their infancy. Yarosh advocates for what greatness looks like in the arts, showcasing at his destination gallery the works of both new and established museum-recognized artists of merit in a space designed to replicate the intimacy of an artist’s home.