In Memoriam

Robert R. Anderson was an American-born artist and grew up in Orange, New Jersey. He was a graduate of the State University of New York at Brockport, NY, and later earned his MFA degree from Pratt University. Anderson was represented by the OK Harris Gallery in New York. His work can be found in collections across the United States. Anderson produced numerous instructional videos on photorealism and color theory throughout his career and he was the co-author of Art of the Dot. He also worked as a technical and fine art consultant to Liquitex Art Products and served on the NJ Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts as a City Cultural Commissioner and as an advisor. During his lifetime, he was the recipient of three New Jersey State Council on the Arts Fellowship Grants and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. Robert Anderson passed away in 2010.

Over a career spanning six decades, Baker created an enormous catalog of drawings, paintings, monoprints and etchings, exhibiting on both the east and west coasts. Although she dealt with a wide range of subject matter, she was particularly compelled by the beauty of the human body. During her lifetime, she won attention and accolades for her sensitive treatment of nudes. Her prints hang in private collections in California, New Jersey and Florida.

She attended NYC’s Parsons School of Design and later studied printmaking at the Montclair Museum of Art and the New Jersey School of Visual Art. She was a founding member of Cat’s Paw Studio in Montclair and an early member of Studio Montclair.

Phyllis Baker’s artistic talent was prodigious, and not limited to works on paper. She was an expert seamstress. She was a culinary master who could throw a (kosher!) dinner party for twelve without blinking an eye. She played a mean folk guitar. She loved opera, Mozart, literature . . . and science fiction. She was a devoted wife and mother, filling her home with warmth and beauty. She had an open mind that could surprise – and delight – anyone lucky enough to know her.

Eric was born on July 28, 1952 and grew up in the Bronx, He graduated from Memphis State University, where he received a B. F. A. in Painting and Sculpture. He lived in New York City and Hoboken for a number of years before moving to Maplewood with his family in 1997. He worked for many years as a designer, creating custom displays, exhibits and interiors and doing commissioned illustrations. A career change brought him into the construction industry as a project manager and, most recently, as a structural masonry inspector. He retired in 2015.

Eric returned to making art in 2007, an endeavor that brought him great joy. Working in mortar and mixed media, his work incorporated elements of architecture, painting, drawing and sculpture. He was a much-loved artist involved with 1978 Arts Center, Studio Montclair and Valley Arts. Eric’s large-scale sculpture, The Essex Column, is on permanent exhibit at the Wildflower Sculpture Park in South Mountain Reservation. Another large piece won First in Sculpture at a JCC Juried Show in Whippany. His work with mortar and found materials repurposed non-traditional elements and elevated them through the use of classic design strategies. Eric participated for many years in the Artist’s Studio Tour, and was a featured artist for Maplewood Library’s 2018 Ideas Festival.

Eric also loved playing and listening to music. He had a band that played in NYC in the 80s, and recently he played locally under the name Ronnie Beck. One of his greatest joys was playing his guitar and singing.

He also loved playing Scrabble, watching foreign films and vacationing on Long Beach Island with his wife Joanne. He was a lifelong Yankees fan, and thoroughly enjoyed reading Patrick O’Brian’s Auburey-Maturn novels, often sharing passages aloud.

Beerman was born in Providence, Rhode Island on 15 November 1923. She studied painting under John Frazier at the Rhode Island School for Design and earned her BFA. 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, the Atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Negasaki.

Beerman 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.

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.

The artists work was explored in a 2015 documentary film Miriam Beerman: Expressing the Chaos.

Beerman died in February 2022, at the age of 98. A retrospective exhibition Miriam Beerman: 1923–2022 Nothing has changed was held at the Rechnitz Hall DiMattio Gallery in West Long Branch and included twenty large-scale paintings by the late artist.

Born in Munich, Germany, Kiki has lived in Verona, N.J., for 54 years. Her parents, Walja (nee Svagul) and Thomas Kraa, brought her to the United States in 1956, where she attended and graduated from Butler High School.
She received a BA degree from Douglass College and a master’s in fine arts from Rutgers University. Kirsten studied under Roy Lichtenstein, the father of Pop Art, Ulfert Wilke, the famed Lyrical Abstract Expressionist, and Geoff Hendricks. Kirsten was an integral part of the Feminist Art Movement coming out of Douglass College at the time when Pop Art Happenings, and Abstract Expressionism were revolutionizing the art world. It was through Ulfert Wilke that she was introduced and later represented by the art dealer Richard Feigen.

Experiencing the hardships of World War II in her youth, across Germany and Denmark, left Kiki with many harsh memories, including vivid images that are often incorporated into her paintings. Being mentored by the artists at Douglass College had a strong and positive impact on her artistic approach. Early in her career, she introduced a wide-eyed round-faced character (whose eyes connect with the viewer) into her paintings. This continued in every work she completed, albeit sometimes only a small segment of the character is present.

Her paintings have been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, the Kyoto City Museum, the Larry Aldrich Museum, and locally at the Newark, Morris and Montclair Museums. This exposure led to several art collectors acquiring her pieces, including celebrities such as Greta Garbo, Zachary Scott, and Tony Curtis. The latter of which yielded one of her paintings appearing on the set of the 1965 motion picture “Boeing Boeing.”

After substitute teaching at Verona High School (1974 to 1980), she decided to return to school and obtain her teaching certification at Montclair State College. She joined the staff at Boonton High School as an art teacher in 1982 and took great pride in the accomplishments of her students each and every year. She believed strongly in challenging her students’ creativity. Kiki had an encyclopedic knowledge of art history, and at the same time gave her students a sound foundation in the visual arts. She frequently encouraged her students to submit their own works into competitions and delighted in their successes. Her classroom was always a safe place for students to learn and express themselves. She had endless patience for any student who needed to work at their own pace.

In her own words, “Painting is an experience that must be reimagined, reexamined and reexplored over and over again. Images driven by real-life experiences are infused into an art world of colors, shapes and space. Observable emotions range from the absurd to doubt, futility and humor. These explorations lead to unknown possibilities.”

Endlessly compelled to create art in which she explores new concepts and imagery, her works are frequently exhibited in galleries and museums. Most recently, Kirsten exhibited artwork in the Zimmerli Art Museum, the Morven Museum, the John F. Peto Studio, the 2020 AENJ Member Exhibition: “The Digital Version,” and the upcoming Montserrat College art galleries, “2020 Inspired Views” online exhibition. She was included in “Women Artists on the Leading Edge,” by Joan Marter (Rutgers University Press, 2019), and subsequently interviewed by Avis Berman for the Roy Lichtenstein Archives.

While Kiki devoted much of her life to painting, she loved all the Arts, including opera, theatre, music (classical and rock), ballet, movies and British television series. She loved the art works that others gifted to her, especially those from her students which she cherished. But, most of all, she sincerely loved each and every one of her friends.

Clarence was an artist, by profession and by avocation, and participated in Studio Montclair and The Print Council of New Jersey for many years. He graduated from Syracuse University with a degree in Fine Arts, and completed a Fulbright Fellowship in Denmark following his college graduation. His working career, from 1955 to 1997, was as Art Director in textile design, and he worked for Rose Textile and Arlen Merchandizing in New York, NY. He was married to Barbara Brewton, a fellow artist, in 1955. Barbara died in 2009. Clarence was born in Wampsville, NY, and grew up on a dairy farm in Cazenovia, NY.

Clarence Mather contributed to the world of art for over sixty years. An artist both by profession and avocation, he worked as an art director in textile design and produced many successful works in his experimentation with different media. Mather was one of the original members of Studio Montclair Inc. and contributed to its success by his willingness and enthusiasm to promote the arts through it.

Francesca lived a caring, creative, and honest life, rich with family activities, friends, and art.  The joy of her life was her children and grandchildren.  She was never happier than when she was with them.  She had daily phone conversations with Marc and Christina—listening to them and advising them—but the Tuesdays she spent babysitting Jack and Olivia were most precious to her.  She was full of stories about how handsome and smart they were that day.  Nightly she talked with her sister, Anne Marie, discussing the day’s events.  To be in close touch with her family was, to her, as important as air and water.

With John, her husband of thirty-nine years, she enjoyed rich life imbued with the arts: discussing literature—especially poetry—visiting art galleries and botanical gardens, and traveling in the United States and Europe.   She loved to explore nature locally and abroad, trips to the Great Swamp and local greenhouses, the New York and Brooklyn Botanical Gardens, and Kew Gardens, London. Anywhere she went, it was not uncommon for her during her walk to collect a ginkgo leaf or a pine cone and marvel at its beauty. If you browse through any of her books, you should not be surprised to find a pressed fern or flower, unassumingly resting in a crease.  Together Francesca and John viewed the great art of Florence, Rome, Venice, Paris, Amsterdam, and London, and attended the theater in London and at Stratford-upon-Avon and anywhere else Shakespeare was performed.  Their trip to Japan inspired Francesca’s own art, and their visit to Assisi, the home of her namesake, St. Francis, deeply affected her.

But Francesca’s home was her center.  It contained the stuff and stories of her many interests.  Chief among them were her houseplants:  her collection of Hoyas, African violets, and succulents.  She was always in search of the odd plant, and she knew all their names, both in Latin and English.  Her home life was infused with her Italian American upbringing: the many stories she told about the opera of her childhood, her winning the Dante medal for Italian language excellence, and her claim that Alba made the best Italian pastry in Brooklyn.  Her studio was her treasure trove of art supplies, slips of paper with measurements and color schemes on them, and fragments of poems, and, of course, the beautiful prints she created during her 40 years as a fine art printmaker.

Her home-life, Italian American background, and travel experiences informed her life as a poet and a fine art printmaker, the creative driving forces in her life.  She began her professional career as a teacher of English, American, and World literatures.  She received a BA from Brooklyn College and an MA from NYU, both in English and American Literature, with minors in Comparative Literature and Creative Writing.  She inspired scores of high school and college students to read good literature and think deeply about their own lives. Francesca also taught art to elementary school children ranging from the “young-fives” to eighth graders.   She wrote poetry throughout her life, and published it in well-respected journals both here and in England.  Her subjects, of course, were Family and Nature, her aim always to capture in a carefully crafted stanza the spirit that animated them.  Her sideline as an art photographer complemented her poetry, each photo carefully composed but spontaneously rendered, one of which beautifully captured a delicate dew drop on an orchid leaf.

Her professional life as a fine art printmaker, however, was her creative mainstay.  From time to time, frustrated by all the stuff of printmaking, she would say that she should have remained a poet, but for forty years she continued to make deeply conceived and expertly executed fine art prints.  Her teachers at the Art Students League and the Brooklyn College Art Department—Lois Dodd, Ann Arnold, Philip Pearlstein, Lenart Andersen (Hunter College) but especially Lee Bontecou—continued to inspire her throughout her career.    In her home studio, and at the Summit Visual Arts Center and the Franklin Street Studios in East Orange, she worked tirelessly, assisting newcomers, collaborating with other professional artists, mostly though, creating her own prints, one after another.  Her subjects were Women’s Work, Japonisme, the Italian American Family, Delft and Celtic Tiles, Nature’s Design, Ancient Women, and Abstractions á la Paul Klee. (Recently she had a special interest in Donald Trump.)  For those interested in getting a sample of the breadth and depth of her artistic work and her statement about her own artistic expression, we will be updating her website: www.francescamucciolo.com.  Her skill as a printmaker was recognized by galleries in New York, Washington, D.C., London, Japan, and other distinguished venues.

Francesca’s legacy as a daughter, sister, wife, mother, grandmother, friend, teacher, and professional artist was creative, caring, complex, and, above all, honest.  By those whose lives she touched, she is sorely missed but always lovingly remembered.