Mira Lehr, Pioneering Miami Beach Artist, Dies at 88

The South Florida art scene has lost a giant. Mira Lehr, painter and founder of the influential Continuum art space, has died. She was 88.

A statement posted to Lehr's Instagram confirmed the news on January 24. "Our heartfelt thoughts are with her children, grandchildren, and her entire family. She was an art pioneer, celebrated as 'the godmother of Miami's art scene.' Her life, legacy, and groundbreaking artwork will continue to inspire us," read the post. A cause of death was not given.

Lehr was known for her "eco-feminist" style, influenced by midcentury abstraction and environmental concerns specific to South Florida. She attempted to raise awareness of the ecological impact of human activity on the unique land and oceanscapes of Biscayne Bay and the Everglades. She is best known for her use of resin on Japanese washi paper to create colorful, glossy abstractions of flowers, plants, and other biological forms, as well as her installation "Tracing the Red Thread," which depicted Florida's native mangrove forests as a climate-change metaphor, their tangled roots a maze for lost humanity.

Born in 1934 to a Jewish family in Brooklyn, Lehr was raised in Miami Beach when the city was still officially segregated. In a 2019 interview with New Times, she recalled encountering daily anti-Semitism, walking to school past signs that said "No Dogs, No Jews." She eventually left Florida to attend school at Vassar College in upstate New York, where she received a degree in art history, then continued to New York City during the heyday of abstract expressionism. She rented a studio at Carnegie Hall, studied at the Hans Hofmann School, and socialized with the likes of Joan Mitchell and Robert Motherwell.

In 1960, she moved back to Miami Beach, where her husband had accepted a job at a hospital. Becoming uncomfortable with the nonexistent Miami art scene and conformist attitudes in town, Lehr and a group of women started Continuum Gallery in 1961, one of the first art spaces of its kind in South Florida. Though the space lasted into the 1990s and brought in world-famous artistic minds such as R. Buckminster Fuller, Lehr put her artistic career didn't take off until much later in her life due to her raising a family.

But it did take off.

Like other female artists such as Yayoi Kusama and Luchita Hurtado, who found success late in life, Lehr came to wider attention after she had already reached old age. In the last decade of her life especially, she began to exhibit widely, with solo museum shows throughout Florida at the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami, the Bass Museum, Fairchild Botanical Gardens, the Deering Estate, the Mennello Museum of Art in Orlando, and, most poetically, the Jewish Museum of Florida, housed in a former synagogue on South Beach she once lived nearby. Her work has made it into museum collections worldwide, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Smithsonian Museum of American Art in Washington, D.C., the Getty Center in Los Angeles, and many of Miami's institutions.

According to her Instagram account, information on further arrangements following Lehr's death will be available soon.

Correction: A previous version of this article stated Mira Lehr's died at the age of 93. Her age at the time of her death was 88. We regret the error.