Minna Wright Citron
Minna Wright Citron
1896 - 1991
Person TypeIndividual
Terms
BiographyPainter and graphic artist Minna Citron was born in Newark, New Jersey in 1896. She began studies at the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences, NY where she studied under Benjamin Kopman. She went on to study for three years at the New York School of Applied Design for Women, graduating with honors. In 1928, she attended the Art Students League in New York City where she was greatly influenced by Kenneth Hayes Miller, the leader of “The 14th Street School”, home to such artists as Rafael Soyer, Isabel Bishop and Reginald Marsh. She was employed by the Work Projects Administration Federal Art Project, where she taught painting from 1935- 1937. From 1938-1942, Citron traveled to Tennessee where she created murals for the Tennessee Valley Authority. She was drawn to printmaking in the late 1930s after viewing work by Stanley William Hayter, whose well-known graphics workshop, “Atelier 17” had relocated from Paris to New York at the beginning of WWII. Citron began spending time at the Atelier 17, learning new techniques and creating her own innovations combining the deliberate with the accidental. She exhibited a series of experimental prints in the 1950s at the Peter Deitsch Gallery in a show titled “The Uncharted Course”. On her ninetieth birthday, she was honored at Rutgers University’s Douglass College Library in New Jersey as part of the library’s “Women Artist Series”. Citron’s last exhibition was held in 1990 at the Susan Teller Gallery in SoHo, New York City and she died the following year at the age of ninety-five. [IFPDA]
