Courtesy of artist Mira Lehr
Portrait of Mira Lehr
Visual artist Mira Lehr creates paintings, drawings, video installations, sculptures, and small, wearable pieces that are “personally and socially conscious,” and she aims to use art to change the way human beings interact with the natural world—something that seems especially urgent now, during the current COVID-19 pandemic.
Protecting the environment is not a new concern for Lehr. In fact, she has been pounding the creative drum of ecology, land stewardship, and a reduction in the use of fossil fuels for nearly six decades. Now eighty-five, the Florida-based artist’s passion is immediately tangible.
“We are in a crucial time,” she said in an interview for this article. “We have to respect our environment, or we will lose the planet. We need to pay attention. It will be Armageddon if we do not watch out.”
Lehr’s current solo show, Mira Lehr: High Water Mark, was on display at the Mennello Museum of American Art in Orlando, Florida, before the coronavirus shuttered the building.
Courtesy of artist Mira Lehr
Mira Lehr's use of mangroves in art
“I’ve started to use ropes and weave them to look like mangroves,” she says. “Our shorelines build up the earth and serve as a nursery for all kinds of aquatic life. Mangroves are amazing resources. My hope is that when someone sees these works of art, images that refer to nature, they’ll find beauty in what they see and want to make sure that this beauty is not destroyed.”
One section of the exhibit, Lehr explains, pays homage to futurist writer and architect Buckminster Fuller, whose 1969 World Game Project encouraged international cooperation and the protection of natural resources.
“Fuller was a renaissance man,” Lehr says. “After I read an article about him and the ‘Game’ in the Saturday Evening Post, I wrote to him. He was already known for his environmental work and was looking for people to participate in the Game who could think in new ways. He was not looking for experts.”
Lehr was selected as a Game participant and, together with twenty-five others, researched and developed a multi-faceted plan for a more equitable distribution of the world’s many assets.
Courtesy of artist Mira Lehr
Pioneers of Buckminster Fuller 1969 World Game
The Game also suggested ways for people to live in harmony with nature and better protect the air, water, and land from further exploitation and plunder. “Bucky started me off to understand the damage we’ve done to the earth by burning coal and oil,” Lehr says.
Other factors have also played a role in Lehr’s creativity.
As a student at Vassar College from 1952 to 1956, Lehr studied with feminist luminaries including art historian and critic Linda Nochlin. “Vassar was wonderful,” she says, “with many women professors who were great role models, but I was a good girl and did what was expected. I got married and had four children.”
For a time, Lehr and her husband, cardiologist David Lehr, lived in Boston and then moved to New York City. Lehr loved urban life, but by the early 1960s the couple was living in Florida, where David had found a job.
“This felt like the end of the world to me,” Lehr admits. “I already had two kids when we arrived, and I asked myself what I was going to do with myself now that I was here.”
Lehr never forgets her larger purpose: to promote ecology and increased reliance on renewable sources of energy in every piece of art that she creates.
At the time, she says, women artists were disrespected, largely overlooked by the art establishment, and tossed aside as if their work were irrelevant. “Women artists in the 1950s and ‘60s were considered dilettantes, and if they were married and had children, it was even worse,” Lehr recalls.
Not surprisingly, this angered her.
But Lehr did not stew in fury—at least not for long. Instead, she created the Continuum, a gallery run by and for women artists, one of the first such exhibition spaces in the Southeastern United States.
Nonetheless, Lehr’s first few years in Miami remained difficult.
“I never sacrificed my kids, but my career was less vibrant than it is now,” Lehr says. “As it turned out, this was a time for me to learn. Shortly after we moved south, I met James Billmeyer and Nieves Marshaleck Billmyer, artists who had studied with Hans Hoffman. They taught me about space and composition.”
Fast-forward a few decades, and Lehr’s work has been included in more than 300 shows, including Miami’s famed Art Basel, and is in collections and on walls throughout the world.
“I’m always thinking, researching, sketching, or making something,” Lehr says. “My entire house—every room—is my studio. I move between painting, sculpture, and other modalities because I never want to repeat myself or do work that doesn’t feel fresh.”
Her most recent projects have utilized fire, fuses, and gunpowder. “There’s a thrill in the combination of destruction and construction,” she explains. “It’s like I’m part of the underside of creation. It’s exciting. There is also some mystery to it because burning has an unknown quality, and I never know exactly what will happen.”
That said, Lehr never forgets her larger purpose: to promote ecology and increased reliance on renewable sources of energy in every piece of art that she creates.
Courtesy of artist Mira Lehr
Magenta and green mangroves from Mira Lehr's installation
For many art critics, this means that Lehr is an eco-feminist—although she does not use the term to describe herself, she does not object when others use it—and says she is mindful of feminist gains as well as the continuing political inequities in women’s status. But her artwork is less about ending women’s subjugation than it is about provoking viewers to feel a deeper and more sustained connection to nature.
Similarly, she makes no secret of the fact that she hopes her work will inspire viewers to do more to protect the planet.
“Buckminster Fuller promoted a plan to make the world work for everyone,” she says. “He wanted to use the world’s resources to provide a higher standard of living for all of humanity, while arresting pollution and saving antiquities.”
This vision continues to energize Lehr. Indeed, her huge artistic output is truly a testament to Earth’s majesty and a luminous and colorful tribute to all of creation.
Watch this video about Mira Lehr: High Water Mark, or take a virtual photo tour of her artwork here.