About Ellie Mayer Gallery

---

  Artist Eleanor Mayer was born in 1917 in Easton, Pennsylvania to Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. After graduating from Pratt Institute in the 1930s, she went on to become one of the first women art directors in the country. Everything Ellie did was a work of art; creativity flowed from and around her as she sculpted and drew in her home studio, baked and cooked in her kitchen, made a couture suit (she was an expert seamstress), and crafted her collage greeting cards. 

The Bauhaus movement profoundly influenced Ellie and her work as an art director; from concepts to graphic design, illustration and her hand-drawn typography. During her formative years, artists she admired, including Paul Klee, Pablo Picasso, Ben Nicholson, Georges Braque, and Henri Matisse, were making works that were significant breakthroughs in modern art. In 1939, the impact of experiencing Picasso’s “Guernica” had on Ellie as an emerging artist working in New York, was huge. Those artists formed her, and their perspectives on contemporary life and its relevancy was integral to her. Art and ethics conjoined, Ellie believed in the importance of freedom of expression, education and humans being kind to others, no matter their differences in culture, ethnicity or income. Ellie didn’t define success by accolades or material assets but by sharing, connection, community and support.

       As an art director at Abbott Kimble in New York City, Ellie hired fellow Pratt graduate Bob Pliskin (who later became her husband). Four art grads working in the back room did all the art and mechanicals. They called themselves “The Art Mice.” Ellie quit her job as an art director to be a full-time mother. Following her belief that her most important work was to be a present parent, she, however, never stopped using her professional skills and served as a "ghost creative director" throughout the 1940s, 50s and 60s for her award-winning creative director husband at Benton & Bowles. She went back to work as an art director in the late 1960s. 

Ellie often initiated artist trades in her community. When asked by a fellow mother at her children’s school if she’d do calligraphy and design an invitation for an event at an Armenian church, Ellie agreed. She waived a fee in exchange for lessons in how to make baklava and börek pastries. 

    The truth was Ellie’s north star. She was practical and humble. People felt her sincerity, her pure, kind heart in everything she touched. You could taste it in her cooking. In her multi-disciplinary artmaking, she was ever honing down and divining things to their essence – there was a sophisticated simplicity, a minimalism. Her aesthetic, formed by modernism in the art of her time, was evident in her midcentury modern home furnished with pieces by Charles and Ray Eames, Florence Knoll, George Nelson, and hand-made furniture by her husband, and in what she chose to wear: a button-down shirt, pants and navy Keds. Ahead of her time, she embodied an authentic modern elegance. 

       Ellie didn’t place an art career first in her life. She was a great athlete who loved tennis, skiing, dancing and playing piano, but always first and foremost were her family and friends. When asked about her art, Ellie would earnestly reply that her “greatest work of art was my children.” She was the foundation of a long line of artists in the family, including me, her granddaughter. In 2006, when I excitedly told her I was going to have a solo show of my paintings in LA, she waved it aside, sat me down, looked me directly in the eyes and asked how I was really doing. She cared more about the deeper things, like if I was truly happy, the character of my friends, what was enjoyable about my life. 

      In my art studio sits Ellie’s sewing desk and her art supply drawers, where she kept her pencils. I love to open it and inhale the scent; it brings me to her. I’m honored to curate the exhibitions in this extraordinary gallery named after one of the most important people in my life, whom I dearly love and miss, who continues to inspire me in my artmaking and in life. I agree with Ellie that it is vital for our community to bring friends and artists together to share art and the new and exciting perspectives this brings.

-Vezna Andrews, Curator