Minna Harkavy
Born1887 (1887)
Died1987 (aged 99–100)
Known forSculpture

Minna Harkavy (November 13, 1887 – 1987) (birth occasionally listed as 1895[1][2]) was an American sculptor.

She was born in Estonia to Yoel and Hannah Rothenberg[3] and immigrated to the United States around 1900.[4] She studied at the Art Students League, at Hunter College and in Paris with Antoine Bourdelle.[5]

Harkavy was a WPA Federal Art Project artist, for whom she created a 1942 wood relief piece, Industry and Landscape of Winchendon for the post office in Winchendon, Massachusetts.[6]

She was a founding member of the Sculptors Guild and showed a work, My Children are Desolate Because the Enemy Prevailed in the Second Outdoor Sculpture Exhibition[7] Negro Head in the 1940-1941[8] and Woman in Thought in 1941.[9]

Harkavy was a founding member of the New York Society of Women Artists. Politically she was known as a leftist and anti-fascist with a strong social consciousness. In 1931 she exhibited a bust of Hall Johnson in the Museum of Western Art in Moscow and the work was purchased for the Pushkin Museum there.[10] In 1932 she represented the John Reed Club at an anti-war conference in Amsterdam.[3]

A bust of Italian-American anti-fascist (and her lover[3]) Carlo Tresca who was assassinated in New York in 1943 was installed in his birthplace of Sulmona, Italy.[10]

She was one of 250 sculptors who exhibited in the 3rd Sculpture International held at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in the summer of 1949.

She married Louis Harkavy, a New York pharmacist who also wrote for Yiddish-language periodicals.[3]

Work

Harkavy's works can be found in:

Harkavy's New England Woman, was displayed at the New York World's Fair of 1939[3]

References

  1. ^ Rubenstein, Charlotte Streifer, American Women Sculptors, G.K. Hall & Co., Boston, 1990, p. 266
  2. ^ McGlauflin, Alice Coe, ed., Who's Who in American Art 1938–1939 vol.2, The American Federation of Arts, Washington D.C., 1937
  3. ^ a b c d e "Minna B. Harkavy". Jewish Virtual Library. Retrieved 29 October 2022.
  4. ^ "Minna Harkavy, 101, Sculptor and Teacher". The New York Times. 4 August 1987.
  5. ^ Opitz, Glenn B, Editor, Mantle Fielding's Dictionary of American Painters, Sculptors & Engravers, Apollo Book, Poughkeepsie NY, 1986
  6. ^ a b Park, Marlene and Gerald E. Markowitz, Democratic Vistas: Post Offices and Public Art in the New Deal, Temple University Press, Philadelphia, 1984, p. 214
  7. ^ Sculptors Guild Second Outdoor Exhibition: 1939, The Sculptors' Guild, New York, 1939, p. 50
  8. ^ Sculptors' Guild Travelling Exhibition: 1940-194, The Sculptors' Guild, New York, 1940, p. 26
  9. ^ Sculptors Guild Third Outdoor Sculpture Exhibition: 1941, The Sculptors' Guild, New York, 1941, p. 25
  10. ^ a b Rubenstein, Charlotte Streifer, American Women Sculptors, G.K. Hall & Co., Boston, 1990, pp. 266–267
  11. ^ "Minna Harkavy". Whitney Museum of American Art. Retrieved 29 October 2022.
  12. ^ Garvey, Timothy J. (1995). "Merchants as Models: The Merchandise Mart Hall of Fame and Changing Values in Postwar Chicago". Illinois Historical Journal. 88 (3): 154–172. ISSN 0748-8149. JSTOR 40192955.
  13. ^ "The head of the worker". NeWestMuseum. Retrieved 29 October 2022.
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