Ruth Abrams, 1912-1986

Ruth Abrams was born in Brooklyn, New York. In the 1930s she studied art at the Art Students' League, Columbia University, and the School of Social Research, and worked in the ateliers of sculptors William Zorach, Aleksandr Archipenko, and Jose de Creeft, and painters John Graham, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, and Wallace Harrison.

At the age of nineteen Ruth Abrams married Charles Abrams, who would later become a prominent urban planner and housing expert as well as a member of Governor Harriman's cabinet. The couple had two daughters, Judith and Abby.

Between 1965 and 1966, Ruth Abrams was Art Director for the New School of Social Research Association. She also lectured at the Parsons School of Design and elsewhere on changing perceptions of space as affected by advanced space technology.

Ruth Abrams was a painter of the New York School. As early as the 1940s she exhibited at the American Contemporary Art Gallery along with Hans Hofmann, I. Rice Pererira and Giorgio Cavallon and, over the years, remained closely associated with Abstract Expressionists. Ruth Abrams devoted an impressive body of work to such problems as visual perspective and the image of space and scale. Beginning in the late 1950s Ruth Abrams was preoccupied with the technique of action painting in relation to cosmic space. She created a series of paintings in small format called Microcosms . In the 1970s Ruth Abrams produced a film, Paradox of the Big, to further explain her artistic vision. The film sought to remove the viewer from any sense of scale and concentrated on the vision of the work, the loss of horizon line, the sense of endlessness, and speed that Abrams wanted to impart.

NOTE: A detailed biography can be found in Ruth Abrams. Paintings, 1940 to 1985. New York: Grey Art Gallery and Study Center, 1986. A copy of this publication can be found in the reference library of Yeshiva University Museum.