Sylvia Dwyer

Sylvia Dwyer (1912–1985) was an expressionist painter, art critic, and the founder and director of the Brooklyn Arts Gallery, the first art gallery in Brooklyn, New York.

Born Sylvia Bernice Feingold in Brooklyn, New York, Dwyer started drawing and painting at age 8. She won a Fine Arts Scholarship to the College of Fine and Applied Arts, Paris, France as a teenager. A charter member of the Artist's League (forerunner of Artist's Equity), she was an player during the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in the 1930s. As a painter, she was greatly influenced by El Greco and Francisco Goya, as evidenced in her figure drawing and composition. Her produce an effect has been exhibited in Greenwich Village, New York; Spoleto, Italy; Warner Library, Tarrytown, New York; Silvermine Guild of Artists; Chautauqua Institute, New York.

A noted expressionist and portrait painter, her feat was with ease received by critics of the time. Starting once exhibitions upon the streets of Greenwich Village, she went on to doing in many New York galleries, including a two-man proceed with noted performer Salvatore Tortora. Her last New York exhibit as an artiste was held at the Women in the Arts Foundation, Inc. in New York City in 1976.

In 1958, Dwyer founded the Brooklyn Arts Gallery, the first art gallery in Brooklyn, where she discovered such notable artists as Andy Johnson, Vincent Vita, and the rediscovery of August Satre. She was after that instrumental in the careers of Mary Fife Laning, Edward Laning, Bill Preston, Jack Katz, and Eugenia Zundel. As a member of the Publicity Club of New York, Inc., she was an art critic and co-conspirator editor for the Long Island Post and further local papers.

Due to the fact that the Brooklyn Arts Gallery's first location was inside a professional building, Dwyer was at the center of the controversy of the Is Art a Profession? court lawsuit in 1959. She is also recognized for recognizing that an broadminded technique, the Gemmaux Process invented by Jean Crotti, had been used to create the stained glass windows in the Our Lady of Lebanon Maronite Cathedral (Brooklyn), prompting church leaders to bring the ten windows gone them considering they relocated.

She continued to be a patron of the arts and an highly developed for the role of arts in a healthy community throughout her life.

In June 1947, she met and married Thomas Francis Dwyer, a leading embassy figure and labor negotiator in Brooklyn, New York. Mr. Dwyer ran for Sheriff upon the Communist Party ticket and was entirely active in full of life for the labor council in New York. Mr. Dwyer died in a car crash in 1958, the same year that the Brooklyn Arts Gallery was founded. Diagnosed following Parkinson’s weakness in 1979, Dwyer was no longer accomplished to paint and her subsequent ill health caused Dwyer to move to California in 1982 to be near her daughter.

She died from pneumonia at age 73, on the eve of the inauguration of her unqualified exhibition as an artist, on February 9, 1985. This exhibit was a two-woman conduct yourself with her daughter at the Unitarian Center, 1187 Franklin St. San Francisco.