Mira Lehr

The eco-feminist artist Mira Lehr was born in New York in 1934. Her solo and group exhibitions number more than 300. Three of her works were recently acquired in September of 2022 by The Metropolitan Museum of Art New York.

She graduated from Vassar College in 1956, where she studied under the mentorship of Linda Nochlin, the renowned feminist art historian. Lehr is recognized as “the Godmother of Miami’s art scene” because in 1961 upon her return to Miami from New York, she co-founded one of the country’s first co-ops for women artists, Continuum, which thrived for more than 30 years from 1961 into the mid 1990s.

She is the subject of a new 420-page international monograph, published by Skira Editore (one of the world's foremost publisher of art books). In the recent decade her work has continued to reach more people and even greater acclaim, creating more new work than ever before up until this month.

Lehr's work has been collected by major institutions, including: The Metropolitan Museum of Art New York; the Smithsonian Museum of American Art (DC); Getty Museum Research Center (L.A.); the Boca Raton Museum of Art; Perez Art Museum Miami; the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center (NY); the Margulies Collection; the Mennello Museum of American Art; MOCA North Miami; the Patricia and Phillip Frost Art Museum-FIU; the Jewish Museum of Florida-FIU; and the Orlando Museum of Art, among others.

Lehr's work is included in the Leonard Lauder Corporate Collection NY, and in the private collections of Elie and Marion Wiesel, Jane and Morley Safer, and Judy Pfaff, among others. Thirty of her paintings were commissioned for Mount Sinai Hospital Miami Beach. Her work is in American Embassies around the world, and is permanently on view at the Sloan Kettering Memorial Center in New York. Lehr's large-scale installation "Sacred Dreams" is permanently on view in Miami Beach at the Jewish Museum of Florida-FIU, gifted by Dr. Robert B. Feldman.

In the 1950s, Lehr studied and worked in New York where she met some of America’s most prominent masters, including Joan Mitchell, Lee Krasner, and Helen Frankenthaler. Lehr studied with James Brooks, Ludwig Sander, Robert Motherwell, and within the Hans Hofmann circle. She was selected in 1969 by Buckminster Fuller as one of only two artists for his World Game Project on sustainability (preceding the first Earth Day). Lehr’s installation, V1 V3, was exhibited at the New Museum in New York.

Throughout her more than six decades of artmaking, Lehr's nature-based work encompassed painting, sculpture, and video. She used nontraditional media such as gunpowder, fire, fuses, Japanese paper, dyes, and welded steel. Lehr ignited and exploded fuses to create lines of fire across her paintings.

The artist was recently selected for three concurrent exhibitions during Art Basel Miami Beach 2022/Miami Art Week, including a group show at the Jewish Museum of Florida-FIU in South Beach (on view until April 2023), and a group show at the Center for Visual Communication in Wynwood (on view until March 15, 2023); and a solo exhibition at Rosenbaum Contemporary that was also on view during Art Basel. Lehr's painting "Norweky" is also currently on view now at the Boca Raton Museum of Art, as part of its permanent collection gallery.