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With drawings by her great grand daughter Nicole Eisenman - An Intergenerational Exhibit

Exhibit invited by and partially funded by Joan C. Sall, Director Emerita, PMJA. 

About The Exhibit
Born in 1886 in a village outside of Krakow, Poland, Esther Hamerman raised a family in Vienna before fleeing the Nazis to the Americas, arriving in New York in 1944. Hamerman began painting late in life and unexpectedly found success as a nationally-known folk artist. Painting with her canvas flat on a table, surrounded by postcards, newspapers, snacks, and a lifetime of memories, she heartily enjoyed making pictures. Hamerman’s larger paintings are intricate images seemingly woven from sources as disparate as Caribbean carnivals and Jewish weddings, I Love Lucy and football, cable cars and steamships.

Nicole Eisenman grew up admiring her great-grandmother Hamerman, affectionately called Mutti, whose art hung throughout Eisenman’s family home in suburban New York. Born in 1965, Eisenman has become an influential contemporary American painter, freely mixing art history, feminism, and punk in edgy yet gorgeously painted canvases. It is a startling realization that an artist known as a “bad girl” in the 1990s is enamored with Hamerman’s deceptively simple technique of layering oil paint and ink drawing. Hamerman’s pictorial style possesses an integrity springing from the everyday handicraft and symbolic storytelling that have enriched Jewish life for centuries.

The felicitous pairing of fourteen Hamerman paintings from the 1950s and five new Eisenman drawings creates a delightful intergenerational dialogue. Both artists paint richly detailed, colorful, and often humorous compositions. Their scale ranges from the incidental moment to the sweep of history. Carnival City, the first exhibition of Hamerman’s art on the East Coast in over two decades, shows how her paintings continue to be a touchstone, providing a solid legacy and a challenge to invent.