About Mym Tuma
Mym Tuma’s career has spanned four decades during which her style, capabilities, perspective and a host of other attributes allow her to present a unique contribution to the body of art history.
By age 5 there was no question that Mym’s talents lay in the artistic world. Colors, scissors, paste, imagination created visually rendered stories which may have been crude to her elders but intrigued her. As she moved through the school system studies were supplemented by making patterns for clothes, portraiture, life studies, anatomy. Particularly valuable to her development was an acute ability to remember pictures, faces, conversations, colorations and the like; in short, she is possessed of a photographic memory.
At Northwestern University she majored in Art, minored in psychology and education. Upon graduation she used her developed expertise to secure professional employment with an architectural design firm. Two years later, she applied to the Art & Architecture Department at Leland Stanford University and competed and was accepted for the prestigious Harley J. Earl Scholarship for the Master’s Program in Painting and Philosophy. After her degree was conferred she was awarded a painting scholarship to study under Esteban Vicente at New York University. On her coast-to-coast trip she was able to arrange a trip to Abiquiu to visit the then aging Georgia O’Keeffe.
The late Henry Geldzahler, Former curator of 20th Century Painting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and long-time Hamptonite, wrote that the artist has “taken Georgia O’Keeffe to a new level, in her own style.” Mr Geldzahler continued, “I am particularly impressed with her … portrayal of inner light. Tuma’s best pictures are pastels drawn with a rich impasto-like density of color that glows with light.”
Mym Tuma works on the East End, Long Island, New York. Her sculptured paintings have been exhibited at museums and galleries, including Guild Hall, in East Hampton, the Parrish Art Museum, in Southampton, and the Clayton-Liberatore Gallery, in Bridgehampton. Examples of her work are in the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D.C., the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford, in Palo Alto and in private collections.