Miriam Beerman

Miriam Beerman (born 1923) is an American painter and printmaker.

Beerman was born in Providence, Rhode Island, where she later earned her BFA from the Rhode Island School for Design. 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.

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.

The breadth of Beerman's career is evident through her grants, awards, and exhibitions list. Some 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). Her work has been exhibited globally, including at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, and at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, NY.

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.