Trashed art finds home at Bloomfield gallery exhibit

Adiscovery at an apartment trash pickup site in Friendship last year reunited a family with artwork it hadn’t known existed.

Sheila Ali, founder of the Irma Freeman Center for Imagination, 5006 Penn Ave. in Bloomfield, got a call in the spring from Donna Palermo, who had discovered a stack of paintings and pastels in an alley near her home.

“I was taking out my trash and I found this stack of artwork, and it was raining and I thought, ‘This shouldn’t be in the trash,’” Ms. Palermo said. “I let it dry out, and over the next couple days I leafed through it and found a female nude with a sticker on the back saying it was juried art and info about who to return it to.”

The artwork was signed I. Freeman and R. Freeman. Ms. Palermo eventually determined the “I” was for Irma and found the Irma Freeman center on Facebook. She called Ms. Ali, Irma Freeman’s granddaughter.

Ms. Ali added the 50 rescued works to her collection of hundreds that her grandmother created before her death in 1994 at age 91. She curated some for the current exhibit, “Impressions and Found Work,” which runs at the Irma Freeman center through Feb. 1. Hours are Saturday and Sunday 1 to 4 p.m., Monday from 4 to 6 p.m. or by appointment at 412-924-0634.

Three of the works are pastel portraits. Portraits were Irma’s early forte. She was sometimes commissioned to do them, but she otherwise worked in obscurity through most of her life while raising children and helping to raise grandchildren. She did not exhibit her work until she was in her 70s.

Looking through the paintings in Ms. Palermo’s kitchen last summer, Ms. Ali saw works she had never seen before but in them a world she recognized. Most of the works were done by Irma’s daughter, Ruth.

“That is very clearly my grandparents’ kitchen,” she said of a small painting depicting a window and a mirror, one of the paintings in the exhibit.

The artwork had been in the basement of Ms. Palermo’s apartment building and somebody apparently threw it away. The Freemans had never lived in the building, but a former roommate of Ruth’s might have and taken what Ruth left, Ms. Ali said.

“Wherever Ruth lived she left stuff behind,” Ms. Ali said.

Irma Freeman was born in Germany in 1903. She came to the United States in the 1920s and met and married a Pittsburgher named Lou Freeman, a novelty store owner and magician. They were poor, but Irma didn’t think about selling her work.

“It’s hard to sell artwork,” Ms. Ali said. “She was more interested in painting, and she wanted to leave something to us.”

Last month, when the exhibit opened, reporter Bill O’Driscoll, of WESA-FM, aired a fine piece on the art rescue and subsequent exhibit. He described Irma as self-taught. Ms. Ali bristles a bit at that. Her

grandmother had studied fine art at St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia, she said.

“All artists are selftaught,” she said. Even those who have been trained continue to develop their style. “She considered herself a student.”

Some of Irma’s work reaches toward folk art, reminiscent of a self-taught artist, but much of it shows that she was grounded in the rules of angles, proportion and dimension.

From portraits, Irma began experimenting with color and compositions that suggested the impressionists. She took flights of fancy, too.

Consider her lifespan. She missed the first three and the last six years of the 20th century, otherwise her life was contained in an era of art that was wildly experimental and rebellious of tradition — distorted, emotional, abstract, tumultuous, less reflective of what the eye sees and more interpretive.

Picasso’s “Weeping Woman” is an example of that era. It is grotesque, with two eyeballs on one side of a tortured face. The distortion of reality appears to be a commentary on the wretchedness of inhumanity and its corresponding grief.

For people who follow the creative calling, formal training is a grounding component and a stepping-off point. In her granddaughter, Irma Freeman has a 21stcentury stepping-off point — exposure to thousands of people who visit the Irma Freeman Center during Unblurred street crawls every first Friday of each month.

Ms. Ali exhibited Irma’s work often when she opened the center in 2009, then she devoted the space to other artists. She had started showing Irma’s work again in group shows and now, she said, “I’m excited at the thought of launching her career.”