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Pfundt Gallery, Doylestown This exhibit examined the Depression-era works on paper of Bernarda Bryson-Shahn, widow of the artist Ben Shahn, who passed away in December 2004 at the age of 101. The exhibition is co-curated by Mary Veronica Sweeney, an artist and writer from New York City, and Peter Paone, artist and former apprentice to Ms. Shahn's late husband, the painter Ben Shahn. Produced as part of the Works Progress Administration documentary project, the prints featured in this exhibition explored the difficult life of the American worker and farmer in the 1930s. "Her work is an eloquent reminder of a life of passion and commitment," Sweeney says, "and is also evidence of the value of art to teach us about the commonality of our experience." A lifelong activist on behalf of the disenfranchised, Ms. Shahn described President Franklin D. Roosevelt as "a philosophical humanist." Speaking with an interviewer for the Smithsonian Institute's Archives of American Art in 1983, she said: "In those days it was another time of people who were disinherited. That's what Roosevelt meant when he talked about the forgotten man. He provided for human beings something they could really believe in." In 1933 she was working as a journalist and was sent to New York to interview the muralist Diego Rivera. There she met Ben Shahn, then Mr. Rivera's assistant, who would become her life companion. They married in 1969, shortly before Ben Shahn's death.
The pair drove across the U.S. in the mid-1930s, documenting rural life for the Resettlement Administration. They also collaborated on two still-existent murals during the New Deal period: one in what is now an elementary school in Roosevelt, N.J. and the other in the Bronx General Post Office. As she told the Archives of American Art in the 1983 interview: "The things that we were doing in the New In midcareer her work focused mainly on illustration. Among the children's titles she wrote and illustrated were "The Zoo of Zeus" (1964) and "Gilgamesh" (1967). It was later in life, in the early 1970s following the death of her husband, that she took up painting steadily and became recognized as an artist in her own right. Ms. Shahn's one-woman exhibitions included shows at Midtown Galleries in New York in 1983; at the Ben Shahn Galleries of William Paterson University in Wayne, NJ, in 2002; and at the Susan Teller Gallery in Lower Manhattan last year in honor of her 100th birthday. Ms. Shahn's work is in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art and other institutions. Ms. Shahn passed away on December 12, 2004 at her home in Roosevelt, NJ. The exhibit was sponsored by Mary Lou and Andrew Abruzzese and the Pineville Tavern.
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