ORO Editions

These creators, makers of the new, can never become obsolete, for in the arts there is no correct answer. 4

— Daniel Boorstin

My Life In Art

I was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. My father was an interior designer. My mother was a housewife, raising her children and caring for her home – a strong woman with energy, which could have been better directed if she had worked. In her eighties, she talked about the few years before she married. As a young woman, she managed a store selling handbags; as she told us often, within two weeks of work, she was made store manager. She never recovered from that early experience of being independent. I saw my mother’s energy, but determined to use mine more broadly.

I wanted to live in a world of art.

Museums were my earliest art education. From the time I was eight or nine years old, my mother dropped me off at the Brooklyn Museum every Saturday. It was in that encyclopedic museum – a repository of culture and art – that I became passionate about African and Native American art. Those collections were forever imprinted on my consciousness. By the time I was ten, I was traveling by myself on the subway to the Metropolitan Museum and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), where I became a member in 1946 at age 18.

My interest in public art was encouraged while I was an undergraduate at Hunter College. I had painted, and I wanted to be an art major. I studied anthropology, and my visits to the American Museum of Natural History enhanced my understanding of diverse cultures. But my parents’ fears (which mirrored the times) about the bohemianism of artists’ lives affected me, and I received a degree in English Literature and American History instead of Art.

My younger brother, Lee Harris Pomeroy, encouraged continually by my mother, became an architect. From him I learned the importance of context in formulating an architectural solution and, in turn, about the context of public art. I was drawn to artists for their intuitive questioning, and to public art rather than easel or studio art, convinced that placing art in a public context affirms democratic values and enriches the lives of all people, whether conversant with or uninitiated in the arts.

My activities in the arts had their first public expression in the 1950s, when I was a young mother and one of several women (including Eleanor Tunick and Evelyn Mauss) who founded the Rockaway Music and Arts Council, the second such organization in New York State. Our objective was simple: to bring the arts

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Tony Smith

She who Must Be Obeyed

1975

Frances Perkins Building, Washington, D.C.

Page 22

Brassaï

Graffiti 1

1959