Mimi Schiff devoted her entire life in developing her artistic talent. Born in Buffalo, New York in 1929 she has vivid memories of her father’s impassioned response to the atrocities of the Holocaust. It wasn’t until 1980, while studying with a rabbi, when Schiff began to fully understand the painful truth of the Holocaust and why it must never be forgotten.
Schiff embarked on this series of paintings after meeting Holocaust survivor Lucie Cripps, and listening to her describe her life in the concentration camps. The paintings would then go on to immortalize these horrors inflicted on millions of innocent people by the Nazis.
After seventeen years, a complete multi-media educational art exhibit entitled, Engrained Forever Holocaust has been created. She combines unfinished wood panels with collaged glass and acrylic paint. Sanded to expose the natural imperfections and grain of the wood after the application of the paint, these panels express the raw powerful emotions of Schiff’s response to one of the greatest tragedies the world has ever known.
Mimi Schiff studied at the Tyler School of Fine Arts at Temple University in Philadelphia between 1948 and 1951. She also held apprenticeships with Abstract Expressionist painter Hans Hofmann and famed American Watercolorist Charles Burchfield. Her work has been exhibited at synagogues, galleries, and museums throughout the country including the Burchfield Art Center in her native Buffalo and the Butler Institute of American Art in Youngstown, Ohio. She completed her last paintings in 2019 and passed away in 2023.
Her collection was donated to ARTISANworks where several piecs are currently on display. ARTISANworks is a self-funded, not-for-profit art space of over 40,000 square feet in a renovated factory with nearly 500,000 pieces of artwork, antiques, automobiles and memorabilia.
