Quick Facts
Biography
Carol Heifetz Neiman (1937 – 1990) was an American artist who was a member of the feminist art movement of the 1970s, known for her surrealist and xerox art. She also created etchings, and worked in pencil, pastels, and mixed media and was a painter.
Early life
Carol Margolin was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1937 to Benjamin Neiman and Lillian Heifetz.
She married Lionel Margolin in 1957. They first moved to New York for his medical residency at Bellevue Hospital, where Ms. Neiman taught 8th grade art class in New York. They moved to Los Angeles in 1961, and had two children.
As standards changed for taking a husband's name in marriage, Carol Heifetz Neiman's name changed from Carol Margolin, to Carol Neiman-Margolin until her divorce in 1980; then to Carol Neiman, and finally adopting the matrilineal Carol Heifetz Neiman.
Career
Carol studied as a child at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and attended Newcomb College in New Orleans, at Northwestern University, and the University of Southern California with many artists, such as Francis de Erdely, George Cohen, Ida Kohlmeyer and J. L. Steg.
Neiman began working more seriously in 1965, primarily in oil and pastels. She moved to a studio space in 1968, and in 1972, Neiman founded Art/West Fine Arts Center, a co-working collaborative in West Los Angeles that provided studio space for several artists. In 1973, Neiman—as Carol Neiman-Margolin—held a two-woman show, "This Venice," with Carol Quint at the Los Angeles Museum of Natural History on material from Venice Beach, California.
Venues her work was shown prior to the LACMA show include Santa Monica College, Womanspace, Oklahoma Art Center, Springfield Museum of Fine Arts, Butler Institute of American Art, Kent State University, and the Audubon Artists Society in New York. At that time her work was in the collection of the California State University and Colleges.
The LACMA show completed a transition from previous work that was in a style of either realism or modernism to work that was often feminist in subject matter and increasingly surrealist in style. Neiman also had a one-woman show at the Brand Museum, integrating details of the physical location with revelations about femininity.
Neiman was an early experimenter in the realm of technology-assisted art, with a series based on color Xerox art combining iterations of xerox and prismacolor pencil.
Neiman also began experimenting with Computer art using a Tandy computer in the late 1980s.
In 1989, Neiman was included in Exposures, Women & Their Art:
[Surrealists] endeavored, according to Breton, to make manifest that certain point for the mind from which life and death, the real and the imaginary, the past and the future, the communicable and the incommunicable, the high and the low cease being perceived as contradictions." Carol Neiman is a contemporary surrealist. Breton's words could serve as a canny description of the mental states depicted in her complex and often unsettling compositions.
Involvement in Feminism
Neiman was involved in events regarding the visibility of women artists. In 1986, Neiman was a co-coordinator of the artists Women Artist Visibility Event (WAVE).
Neiman was President-elect of the Women's Caucus for Art at the time of her death in 1990. Carol Heifetz Neiman died of lung cancer at age 53 in Los Angeles, CA.