Finding Lost Voices: An Important Artist who disappeared, Lily Furedi (1896 - 1969)
A weekly email that brings back the voices of those who have been forgotten or misremembered
Welcome to the latest issue of Finding Lost Voices. I want to begin this week’s post with a thank you to all who have become paid subscribers. I appreciate your support as I transition into my next research project — writing my book Strong about the history of strong-bodied women in the United States from the late 1800s to the present. This work requires travel to research collections, and your subscription to this blog supports that research. If you’ve enjoyed these posts and have the means, please consider becoming a paid subscriber.
I moved to New York City to attend New York University for my MFA when I was twenty-two. One night, my new friend Nicole Hefner and I found out about a nearby reading held at a bar called Detour. We set off walking down First Avenue toward the bar when suddenly, a car ran the red light and struck another vehicle. Soon, that car was barreling toward us on the sidewalk. Before we knew it, Nicole was thrown against the wall, and I was struck in the legs and thrown fifteen feet in the air. When I landed, I woke up; the world was surreal. A man stood looking down at me, yelling, are you okay? I looked over at Nicole; she was seated and looking down, stunned at the cigarette she still held. The ambulance came. We were strapped down to the headboards and transported to Bellevue Hospital. Nicole and I, studying poetry and high on the adrenaline that surged through our bodies, were thrilled to think we were going to the same institution that once housed one of our favorite poets, Sylvia Plath. I would spend the next week in that hospital on morphine, alone, except for the new friends I’d made in the first week of my program. I had a badly broken leg and nerve damage on the other leg, but it was an accident I was able to heal from.
Last week, I returned to New York to give a talk at NYU. It felt like coming full circle, returning to the scene of the accident, so to speak. Nicole and I are still friends, and she texted me before to tell me I’d do great.
The night before, I’d gone to the New School to visit a friend. While I was at the party, my friend Laura introduced me to John Reed, who she knew shared an academic interest with me in looking back at the past to see who had been forgotten. When I told John about my Substack column and how I was always looking for lost voices to showcase here, he started naming the names of female artists I’d never heard of: Elizabeth Olds, Mary Frank, and Lily Furedi. Elizabeth Olds (1896 - 1991) was a silkscreen artist; Mary Frank (b. 1933 and still living) once trained with Martha Graham as a modern dancer and became a sculptor. But when I dove into researching these women, Lily Furedi’s life struck me. Particularly the murals she created at Bellevue Hospital called “A Simple Life,” which somehow brought it all back: the accident, the hospital, and the surreal days I had inside it.
Lily Furedi (1896 –1969) was born in Budapest, where she was likely trained as an artist. Little is known of her life before she stepped on a ship in Los Angeles when she was thirty-one years old, except that she lists her occupation as a painter on the ship's manifest. In 1931, she won a prize for her painting, “The Village,” from the National Association of Women Painters and Sculptors when they held their Christmas show at the Argent Gallery that January. For the next decade, her work would appear frequently in group exhibitions around New York. But she created her painting, “The Subway, “for the U.S. Public Works of Art Project Early in 1934, for which she would be well known.
“The Subway” was one of twenty-five selected from those produced by the WPA to be given as gifts to the White House, and both President and Eleanor D. Roosevelt thought it was among the best. But while her painting has lived on in the public domain (it has been used in NY Times book reviews, and as an illustration in books, articles, and websites, Furedi’s name and reputation have slipped behind a wall of obscurity. Just as her mural “Simple Way of Life” for the women’s sizeable occupational therapy room in the Psychiatric Building of Bellevue Hospital had hidden behind the white paint that had been painted over it in 1996 when I lay in my hospital bed a few floors away, but there she was, another foremother I couldn’t see supporting me asking me to look deeper, to find what is hidden underneath.
When I finished my talk, there was another text from Nicole, “How’d it go?” I was walking across Washington Square Park, under the famous arch thinking of the three decades that had passed since we’d been thrown off our course by that car. How time seems to stand still at the same time that it moves so fast. Her text brought me back to the present. The beautiful present where I get to keep writing to you, reader, about the lost voices that have supported us all along whether we could see them or not.
Upcoming Readings
I hope to see you all at some of my upcoming events!
February 26, 6:00 PM - Iris Jamahl Dunkle reads at King's English, Salt Lake City, UT
February 27, 3:30-5 PM - Iris Jamahl Dunkle reads at American West Center, LNCO 2110, Salt Lake City, UT
March
March 5, 4:30 - 6:00 PM- Iris Jamahl Dunkle in Conversation with Gavin Jones at The Bill Lane Center for the American West: Stanford, CA
March 6 - UC Boulder/Center for the West, online lecture. Details are coming soon!
March 13- 5:00 PM Iris Jamahl Dunkle Reads from Riding Like the Wind: The Life of Sanora Babb, Garden City Community College, Kansas
March 14 - 6:30 PM - Iris Jamahl Dunkle at Books and Books in Key West, FL
March 21 - 2:00 PM Iris Jamahl Dunkle at the New York Public Library, New York City
March 30, 4:00-5:30 PM, Iris Jamahl Dunkle at the Occidental Center for the Arts, Occidental, CA
April
April 12 - 3:00 PM Iris Jamahl Dunkle reads at Full Circle Bookstore, Oklahoma City.
May
May 17 - 5:30 - 7:30 PM - Iris Jamahl Dunkle at the National Steinbeck Center, Salinas, CA
Oh I love this so much! 💕
Lily Furedi is a treasure. A deep soul. But let's talk about Mary Frank. Terrific work Iris. A gift to us all.