Lena Gurr

1897 -1992

Painter • Printmaker • Graphic Artist

Born in Brooklyn in 1897, she studied at the Brooklyn Training School for Teachers, at the Educational Alliance Art School, the Arts Students League with John Sloan, and with M. Sterne in Paris as well as in Mentone and Nice, France.

Gurr was a member of the Artists League of America, the National Association of Women Artists, the New York Society of Women Artists, the Brooklyn Society of Artists, Audubon Artists and the American Artists Congress. She exhibited in many of the shows held by these organizations and at the Whitney Studio Club, National Academy of Design, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Brooklyn Museum, and at the World's Fair (1939).

Her work is represented in the collections of the Biro-Bidjan Museum in Russia and at the Library of Congress, where she has been selected as a "Curator's Choice" in the Smithsonian Archives of American Art. In addition to her career as a painter, lithographer and seriographer, she also taught art in the New York City public school system. She had three solo shows at the ACA Gallery in 1935, 1939 and 1945, and then a retrospective in 1963.

In 1931, Gurr married Russian-born painter and photographer Joseph Biel. Born in 1891, Biel studied at the Russian Academy in Paris and at the Workman's College, Melbourne, Australia. He also established the first Jewish Library in Melbourne. Upon his arrival in the United States, he studied under George Grosz at the Art Students League. Biel died in 1943 of a heart ailment.

Notable among Gurr's colleagues - many of them WPA artists - were Mary Cecil Allen, Mary Ascher, Dorothy Block, Jean Antoine DeMarco, Emma Ehrenreich, Clara Fasano, Ralph Fabri, Juliana Force, Minna Harkavy, Rockwell Kent, Karl Knaths, Louis Lozowick, Ross and Dorothy Moffett, John von Wicht and Lynd Ward.