Visual Arts
Diane Burko, The Per Contra Interview with Miriam N. Kotzin
"I was ambivalent about being an artist
professionally. I began taking art classes at the Brooklyn Museum in the
third grade and continued doing so in MOMA in junior high school. In high
school I returned to the Brooklyn Museum as a monitor in the night painting
classes. I then chose a college that would provide academic options and a
strong art department: Skidmore in Saratoga Springs, when it was still a
women’s college.
It was there that I decided I would devote my life to being an artist. I had
a mentor named Arnold Bittleman, who studied at the progressive Black
Mountain College and then Yale and was a protégé of Albers. He was a Jewish
man from the Bronx whose father was a butcher. He gave me permission and
courage to be an artist."
© 2005-2010 Per Contra: The International Journal of the Arts, Literature and Ideas