MARCIA C. SHEER

(1916 - 1989)

Marcia C. Sheer was born in Brooklyn, New York and early on saw much of the United States during cross country trips with her family. Despite the vicissitudes of the Great Depression, her family managed to send Marcia to the Julliard School of Music to study piano. She cut short a professional performing career, and turned her creative focus from classical piano to painting.

By 1938 Ms. Sheer had become deeply involved with the WPA Artists Project, and continued in its painting program through 1940. During the late 1930's and through the war years she showed her work in New York, Provincetown, and the Hamptons. In the early 1950s she was painting in the abstract expressionistic style and by 1953 had become a student of Hans Hoffman. During this same period and on into the 1960's, Ms. Sheer also became interested in the psychotherapy of Wilhelm Reich; embraced the philosophical and dietary program of George Osawa, founder of the Zen Macrobiotic diet; arid made a livelihood as a textile stylist and designer.

In the 1960's Ms. Sheer's art grew bolder - brightly colored acrylic canvasses and freestanding wall hangings- and she began to exhibit her work more widely throughout the United States. Many eminent celebrities collected her work, including Jonas Salk, U Thant, Leonard Bernstein, Jacqueline Onassis, and Dorothy Kilgallen.

In the late 70's Ms. Sheer shifted her creative efforts to photography. Experimenting at first with various media from black and white to altered SX-70 Polaroids, she finally decided to avoid modern equipment and mechanized printing processes, instead Ms. Sheer employed simple hand-constructed pinhole cameras and nineteenth century printing techniques to achieve images with a haunting, magical quality.

It is these images -- the warm sepia shades of the kallitype and the cool blue tones of the cyanotype -- which became the hallmark of her photographic achievements. She turned her lensless cameras on places of her youth: Manhattan's Central Park and Brooklyn's Prospect Park and Botanical Gardens; and which captured the essence of her travels to the Grand Canyon and the great European cities of Amsterdam, Bruges, and Venice.

Exhibitions of her pinhole photography Include several shows at the Puchong Gallery (1986 1990), the Arsenal Gallery in Central Park (1987), Foto Galerie 2 1/2 x 4 1/2 in Amsterdam, Holland (1988), and the International Center of Photography (1989), a show which would have made her Justifiably proud, as she studied there early in her photography career while also working as a volunteer in its education department.

The Images from Ms. Sheer's last project --her Venetian series on view in this exhibit -- depict the timeless, Victorian quality of her work, and demonstrate her mastery of the pinhole technique. The following quotation embodies her approach to photography as well as the spirit which permeated her life.

"I fantasize that I control the stream of light entering the camera through its tiny opening. This light stream gently travels around the camera's interior and I use it to paint the image onto the film with little brush-like strokes. Eventually, I control this magical light stream, will it to inscribe all the poetry and essence of what was to become a completely formed image in my camera."