Miriam Beerman (1923–2022) was a contemporary maker of painterly power objects, imbuing the paint with profound psychology as well as beauty.
Beerman was born in Providence, Rhode Island and studied at the Rhode Island School for Design where she earned her BFA. She also studied in New York City at the Art Students League and the New School for Social Research. Additionally, she studied at Atelier 17 in Paris, France.
Although Beerman maintained the aesthetics of abstract expressionism, her unique original art focuses on figurative bestial and macabre characters who convey provocative and penetratingly intense emotions. Her work includes automatic gestures, vivid colors, and stippled textures that evoke the feeling of devastation and grief. Her subject was the arena of the human condition whether expressed overtly with imagery evoking genocide or abstractly through the call and response of process. Some of her themes included biblical plagues, the Holocaust, Hiroshima, and the global threat of nuclear annihilation.
Beerman was the first woman to ever have a solo exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum. Following which, she had over 30 solo exhibitions of her work. She exhibited at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, New York, and at the Montclair Art Museum in Montclair, New Jersey. Her work resides in the permanent collections of over 60 museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Whitney, LACMA, Phillips Collection, National Gallery of Art and Victoria & Albert Museum.