Mira Lehr, a flexible Florida artist who helped discovered an early cooperative gallery for ladies artists in Miami Seaside and whose work, sculptures and installations usually mirrored her issues about environmental degradation, died on Jan. 24 in Miami Seaside. She was 88.
She died in a hospital, her household mentioned in an announcement. No trigger was specified.
Ms. Lehr (pronounced “lair”), who exhibited in Florida, New York and elsewhere for many years, was adventurous in her inventive explorations. A few of her work used Japanese rice paper, though she mentioned she had by no means studied Japanese artwork in depth. She created mangrove labyrinths out of rope and metal that exhibition guests might stroll by.
A few of her more moderen works concerned hearth — she would burn holes in canvases or ignite strings of gunpowder on them to create the looks of vines and different results.
“I’m fortunate I nonetheless have eyelashes,” she instructed The Ahead in 2020.
One in every of Ms. Lehr’s formative experiences as an artist got here in 1969, when she was amongst 26 members in an experiment by the inventor and futurist R. Buckminster Fuller known as the “World Recreation,” a logistics train usually described as an “antiwar recreation” that concerned parceling out the planet’s sources for the general good thing about humanity.
“Mira Lehr was a type of gamers challenged to point out how sources might be redistributed extra equally and sustainably, a problem to, in Fuller’s phrases, ‘make the world work’ for all,” Timothy Stott, an artwork historical past professor on the College of Dublin who has written a monograph about World Recreation, mentioned by e mail.
Ms. Lehr took the problem to coronary heart.
“It was an eye-opener for me,” she instructed The Ahead. “I had all the time preferred working from nature in my artwork, however I had by no means thought concerning the earth in its totality like I began to do once I was with him.”
Her artwork in subsequent years, whether or not in two dimensions or three, ceaselessly drew on the pure world, invoking foliage, birds, jellyfish, reefs, the ocean and extra, usually calling consideration to the great thing about nature and the threats to it. A few of her artwork certified as summary or semiabstract, reflecting influences she had absorbed as a younger grownup in New York. However different items defied categorization.
There was, as an illustration, “Mixing Currents,” a chunk created a decade in the past and put in as a part of “Excessive Water Mark,” an exhibition of her work in 2020 on the Mennello Museum of American Artwork in Orlando, Fla. An immersive work that occupied a whole room on the museum, it included a video projection of ocean waves lapping on a sandy shore, cutout shapes representing endangered corals and, dangling from the ceiling, dozens of sunshine bulbs like these utilized by laboratory scientists to speed up coral progress.
“Now we have to think about the loss and destruction and that there’s extra of this to return,” Ms. Lehr instructed The New York Instances in 2020. “However it’s not too late. Now we have the data and skill to cease the destruction.”
Eleanor Flomenhaft, who ceaselessly confirmed Ms. Lehr’s work at her Manhattan gallery, mentioned that Ms. Lehr had taken her environmental artwork severely, consulting with a biochemist and a marine biologist on some works, and that her enthusiasm had been infectious.
“She did her homework,” Ms. Flomenhaft mentioned in a telephone interview. “You’d get connected to her as quickly as you talked to her. Moreover being an artist, this was an inspirational individual.”
Jane Safer, widow of the journalist Morley Safer, mentioned she and her husband first grew to become pals with Ms. Lehr and her husband, Dr. David Lehr, a heart specialist, a long time in the past when Mr. Safer interviewed Dr. Lehr on CBS for a “60 Minutes” section. Ms. Safer mentioned Ms. Lehr threw herself into her artwork after Dr. Lehr’s demise in 1996.
“At a stage when most individuals are sort of winding down creatively, she had this unimaginable burst of inventive vitality,” Ms. Safer mentioned by telephone. “She was innovating and experimenting into her 80s.”
Myra Belle Tager was born on Sept. 22, 1934, in Brooklyn. Her dad and mom known as her Mirabel, which she later shortened to Mira. Her father, Charles, designed and manufactured staplers and different workplace gadgets. Her mom, Pearl (Goodstein) Tager, had as soon as been a hat mannequin.
Mira spent most of her childhood in Chicago and Miami Seaside, then attended Vassar School in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. She graduated in 1956 with a level in artwork historical past and married Dr. Lehr that very same 12 months.
She spent the late Fifties in New York.
“It was the time of the Summary Expressionists’ heyday,” she recalled in a 2020 video interview, and he or she met a few of these artists. These connections proved beneficial after she and her husband moved to Miami Seaside in 1960 and he or she grew to become concerned with a gaggle of different ladies who began an artists’ cooperative known as Continuum.
Miami Seaside wasn’t but the artwork heart it’s at present, however Ms. Lehr’s New York connections and Florida’s climate lured a few of these New York artists south to provide workshops at Continuum within the winter.
The co-op opened its preliminary gallery in 1966 and saved getting in numerous areas into the Nineties. It offered studio area and mounted exhibitions by its members and different ladies artists.
“Once we first began this gallery, they thought we have been loopy, off the wall,” Ms. Lehr instructed The Miami Herald in 1987. “They thought, ‘Why would ladies want their very own gallery?’”
The reply was twofold: One, there wasn’t a lot of an artwork scene in Miami Seaside on the time, and two, what artwork scene did exist was one thing of a boys’ membership.
“The artwork institution was actually male-oriented,” she instructed The Herald. “They ran the galleries. They managed the artwork market.”
After which there was the placement: Florida. Which was not New York.
“In the event you have been a lady and also you lived exterior of New York Metropolis, you have been thought of a dilettante,” Ms. Lehr instructed the Vassar web site in 2020. “So we placed on our personal reveals and have been very glad doing the work.”
Her representatives mentioned that her household was persevering with preparations for the opening of a solo exhibition on the C. Parker Gallery in Greenwich, Conn., this month.
Ms. Lehr is survived by two daughters, Alison Fryd and Elizabeth Matthews; two sons, John and Paul Lehr; and 7 grandchildren.
Ms. Lehr would usually make her gunpowder works in her yard, which, she mentioned, should have left her neighbors questioning. It was a way she first noticed utilized by the Chinese language artist Cai Guo-Qiang and tailored into her personal works. It enabled her to attain eye-catching results, however, she mentioned within the video interview, it represented a dichotomy as nicely.
“It additionally reveals the opposite facet of creation,” she mentioned, “which is destruction.”
Supply: NY Times