James Yarosh Associates Fine Art Gallery is pleased to announce the duo exhibition Miriam Beerman & Sheba Sharrow- Her Story: Revisiting Women Artists of the 20th Century. The exhibition activates a dialogue between two great female humanistic expressionists of the last century.

Building upon recent guest curator roles with Monmouth University and a showing at Art on Paper in New York City, Yarosh continues to advocate for great women artists. Her Story prompts an exploration of Miriam Beerman and Sheba Sharrow, both of whom bore witness to the profound human struggles of the mid-to-late 20th century.

My passion for curatorial activism led me to explore the pairing of these two pioneering artists. When viewed together, their works resonate viscerally. Individual in their styles, both used their artistic voices unapologetically. Together, they lift one another up, each illuminating the beauty and strength of the other.

Sharrow has the ability to transmute serious subject matter with urgent markings, creating charged pieces that prove beauty lives eternal, even in darkness. Through a vigorous and poetic hand, her work reflects on brutality and simultaneously pays homage to the animating power of solidarity, warning the viewer: remember, history’s tragedies repeat.

Beerman’s globally resonant works give voice and witness to persecution with a fearless strength. Her created worlds spotlight the horrors perpetrated by men, demonstrate a special sensitivity to the natural world, and call for humans to acknowledge their responsibility to all living things. As a gifted colorist, her work connects on an almost primal level.

(James Yarosh)

Born in 1923 in Providence, Rhode Island, Miriam Beerman studied painting at the Rhode Island School of Design and went on to spend two years in France as Fulbright Scholar. Beerman was a pioneer, and in 1971 became one of the first women to be given a one-person show at the Brooklyn Museum. When Beerman passed away in February 2022 at 98, she left a six-decade legacy of works that are included in the permanent collections of over 60 museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Phillips Collection, The National Gallery of Art, and The Victoria and Albert Museum.

Sheba Sharrow’s expressionist paintings are masterful and refined, engaging us with mortality and desire, vulnerability and power, warfare and spirituality. Her figurative paintings bear witness to human suffering, struggle and liberation.

Born in Brooklyn in 1926 to Russian-Jewish immigrant parents and raised in Chicago, Sharrow was a child of the Great Depression and World War II, a participant in the social justice movements of the 1960s and ’70s and saw the bloody roads walked for civil rights and the damages wrought by wars. She earned her BFA at the Art Institute of Chicago, studying with Boris Anisfeld and Joseph Hirsch. She continued her studies at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and earned an MFA at the Tyler School of the Arts at Temple University.

She has been considered part of the “Chicago School” of imagist painters. Through a vigorous and poetic hand, her work reflects on brutality and simultaneously pays homage to the animating power of solidarity, warning us: Remember, history’s tragedies repeat.