Louise Edith Fishman American (1939-2021) Untitled, 1989 tempera on paper Provenance: From a private collector, Indianapolis. Provenance; Lennon, Weinberg, Inc. NY, Pamela Auchincloss Gallery, NY, and Robert Miller Gallery, New York. From the archives of AskArt: Louise Edith Fishman was born on Jan. 14, 1939, in Philadelphia. She had art in her genes: Her mother, Gertrude Fisher-Fishman, was an artist, as was an aunt, Razel Kapustin. Her father, Edward, was an accountant. She grew up in Philadelphia immersed in art thanks to her mother — she would sometimes accompany her mother to drawing classes. Years later she incorporated elements of two games she had played in her youth into grid paintings. “One was the basketball court, basically a grid, and I knew where my foot was at all times in relation to the foul line and the half-court line,” she told The Philadelphia Inquirer in 2019, when she had an exhibition at Locks Gallery in Philadelphia. “Same thing when I would play bottle tops. You would make a court on the street with chalk, then get down on the street and shoot these bottle tops around these different boxes. She studied at the Philadelphia College of Art and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts as well as at the Tyler School of Art, part of Temple University. She earned bachelor’s degrees in painting and printmaking and in art education at Temple in 1963, then received a master’s degree in painting and printmaking at the University of Illinois at Champaign in 1965. She moved to New York that year, and was already well into Abstract Expressionism. “I felt that Abstract Expressionist work was an appropriate language for me as a queer,” she said in an interview quoted in a catalog for a 2016 retrospective at the Neuberger Museum of Art in Purchase, N.Y. “It was a hidden language, on the radical fringe, a language appropriate to being separate.” In her long career Ms. Fishman had dozens of solo shows and was featured in countless group shows. Her artistic forays included abandoning paint-on-canvas for a time in the 1970s and exploring aspects of traditional women’s crafts; in some works she stitched together strips of canvas in quiltlike fashion. In addition to Ms. Nyeboe, whom she married in 2012, she is survived by a brother, S.J. Fishman. Ms. Fishman bought a farmhouse in upstate New York in 1987 and used it as a studio and second home. When fire destroyed that studio in 1990, she spent time in New Mexico, recovering her equilibrium and working with the painter Agnes Martin. She began absorbing Chinese philosophies and traditions, and her works from this period show elements of Chinese calligraphy. She continued to impress critics into the new century. 11 3/4"H x 18"W (sight), 31 3/4"H x 26"W (frame)