It is with heavy hearts that we share the news that Mira Lehr has passed away on January 24, 2023.
The New York Times wrote a lovely feature and obituary following her passing.
Mira Lehr, a versatile Florida artist who helped found an early cooperative gallery for women artists in Miami Beach and whose paintings, sculptures and installations often reflected her concerns about environmental degradation, died on Jan. 24 in Miami Beach. She was 88.
She died in a hospital, her family said in an announcement. No cause was specified.
Ms. Lehr (pronounced “lair”), who exhibited in Florida, New York and elsewhere for decades, was adventurous in her artistic explorations. Some of her work used Japanese rice paper, although she said she had never studied Japanese art in depth. She created mangrove labyrinths out of rope and steel that exhibition visitors could walk through.
Some of her more recent works involved fire — she would burn holes in canvases or ignite strings of gunpowder on them to create the appearance of vines and other effects.
“I’m lucky I still have eyelashes,” she told The Forward in 2020.
One of Ms. Lehr’s formative experiences as an artist came in 1969, when she was among 26 participants in an experiment by the inventor and futurist R. Buckminster Fuller called the “World Game,” a logistics exercise often described as an “antiwar game” that involved parceling out the planet’s resources for the overall benefit of humanity.
