Miriam Beerman: Expressing the Chaos

Miriam Beerman is a survivor. In her more than 60 years as a groundbreaking artist, she has overcome personal tragedy to inspire friends, family, peers, patrons, and students about how to remain defiant, creative and strong. Miriam has struggled with her artistic demons to create haunting images that evoke the suffering of generations of victims. At 90 years old, Miriam now lives in a residence home near her family in Washington, D.C. Her memory is not what it once was, yet she is still generating compelling and forceful art. It’s one of the only things she is sure of. The film is a memorable profile of an artist who has elevated her empathy for the plight of the world’s castoffs into powerful portrayals of dignity.

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 colours, and stippled textures that help evoke the feeling of devastation. Some of her themes include biblical plagues, the Holocaust, Hiroshima, and nuclear threat.

Beerman has received numerous grants and awards throughout her career. 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).

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. 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. Her work is in the collection of The Newark Museum of Art and her work now resides in over 60 museums.