Still Life-In Her!
Upper West Side’s Henrietta Mantooth is still painting and exhibiting at the young age of 97.
Introduced at the Ford Foundation Gallery and MOMA in Brazil, Mantooth exhibited his work at the kick-off party of the Gold Standard Art Festival on February 16th at Columbus Avenue.
The festival runs from April 25th to May 1st.
“I really love getting older,” an energetic artist, theatrical stage artist, and performer told Post. “There is excitement and freedom in many ways. And I feel it is a book of history. All of that experience gives me the knowledge to present myself without conscious effort. . “
The first thing that brought Kansas City to Big Apple was the love of Mantooth news. She graduated from Missouri Journalism School.
“I graduated in 1945 just after World War II and headed to New York. I thought it was the place. I was excited to go to the big city. But after the end of the war, a man It was difficult for women to get a job in journalism because the reporters were returning from Europe and Asia. I had a strange job and finally started my research at Publisher Weekly. “
In 1947, she got a job in Caracas, Venezuela through a Latin American journalist she met at college (Spanish was a minor at college). She worked there in the English newspaper Caracas Journal, where she immediately gigged with the American International Association. She said, “She traveled to a rural village in the suburbs, talked to farmers and their families, and wrote their stories.”
After doing the job for five years, she was transferred to Brazil, where she learned Portuguese. “Inspired by the simple farm people’s vision I was writing, I started drawing their shapes and reconnecting with my talent as a kid. I was often a school class artist. ”
In 1952, she married an American journalist in Brazil, began studying art in her spare time from writing, and eventually in Paris, Italy, and Greece.
“I became a full-time artist and began exhibiting my work at the Brazilian Museum Show and the São Paulo Biennale in 1961. My two sons were born in 1958 and 1960 and moved to New York in 1962. “Painting,” she explained, “abstract expressionism is an exciting art happening here, and I loved the work of those artists: Paulo, Deconing …”.
She was also involved in theater, creating original stage sets for Off-Off-Broadway theaters and college theaters, where she also taught as an artist-in-residence.
Mantooth has lived for 60 years in the brownstone of the same West 81st Street between West End Avenue and Riverside Drive.
A charming non-elderly person describes her work as a “witness.” Because she focuses on “usually unknown people: refugees, rebels, farmers, lands, homes, children, animals, men and women who protect and protect ideas.”
Historical figures she would have liked to draw are Eleanor Roosevelt, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Martin Luther King, Jr., and she loves “because he was an improviser.” This is Pablo Picasso.
There is one thing that hasn’t changed for Mantooth. “Every time I pick up a paintbrush to do something new, it’s a risk … I’m addicted.”
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