Carol Heifetz Neiman

Carol Heifetz Neiman (1937–1990) was a woman artist who was a member of the feminist art movement of the 1970s. Ms Neiman was a surrealist and a xerox artist. She also created etchings, and worked in pencil, pastels, and mixed media, and was a painter.

Family Life

Carol Marsha Neiman was born in Chicago, Illinois. Her father, Benjamin Neiman was a pathologist who served in World War II in the medical corps. Her mother, Lillian Heifetz, had studied piano.

She married Lionel Margolin in 1957. They first moved to New York for his residency at Bellvue Hospital, where Ms. Neiman taught 8th grade art class in New York. They moved to Los Angeles in 1961, and had two children, Jessica and Matthew.

As standards changed for taking a husband's name in marriage, Heifetz Neiman's name changed from Carol Margolin, to Carol Neiman-Margolin until her divorce in 1980; then to Carol Neiman, and finally adopting the matrilineal Carol Heifetz Neiman.

Carol Heifetz Neiman died at age 53 in Los Angeles, CA.

Professional Life

Carol studied as a child at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and attended Newcomb College in New Orleans, at Northwestern University, and the University of Southern California with many artists, such as Frances de Erderly, George Cohen, Ida Kohlmeyer and J. L. Steg.

Neiman began working more seriously in 1965, primarily in oil and pastels. She moved to a studio space in 1968, and in 1972, Neiman founded Art/West Fine Arts Center, a co-working collaborative in West Los Angeles that provided studio space for several artists. In 1973, Neiman—as Carol Neiman-Margolin—held a two-woman show with Carol Quint at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) on material from Venice Beach, California.

Venues her work was shown prior to the LACMA show include Santa Monica College, Womanspace, Oklahoma Art Center, Springfield Museum of Fine Arts, Butler Institute of American Art, Kent State University, and the Audubon Artists Society in New York. At that time her work was in the collection of the California Statue University and Colleges.

File:LACMA poster

Carol Heifetz Neiman and Carol Quint: poster for LACMA 2-person show.

The LACMA show completed a transition from previous work that was in a style of either realism or modernism to work that was often feminist in subject matter and increasingly surrealist in style. Neiman also had a one woman show at the Brand Museum, integrating details of the physical location with revelations about femininity.

Neiman was an early experimenter in the realm of technology-assisted art, with a series based on color Xerox art combining iterations of xerox and prismacolor pencil.

Homewrecked Series: What is This Thing Called Love c. 1988, color xerox

Neiman also began experimenting with Computer art using a Tandy computer in the late 1980s.

In 1989, Neiman was included in Exposures, Women & Their Art:

[Surrealists] endeavored, according to Breton, to make manifest that certain point for the mind from which life and death, the real and the imaginary, the past and the future, the communicable and the incommunicable, the high and the low cease being perceived as contradictions." Carol Neiman is a contemporary surrealist. Breton's words could serve as a canny description of the mental states depicted in her complex and often unsettling compositions.

Involvement in Feminism

Neiman was involved in events regarding the visibility of women artists. In 1986, Neiman was a co-coordinator of the Women Artist Visibility Event (WAVE).

File:LA Women Artists

Neiman was President-elect of the Women's Caucus for Art at the time of her death in 1990 of lung cancer.

http://www.nationalwca.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_artists