Aaronel deRoy Gruber Papers and Photographs
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The online materials from the Aaronel deRoy Gruber Papers and Photographs includes a selection of sculpture files documenting the creative process of planning, building, and exhibiting a sculpture during the 1960s and 1970s. The sculpture files include notes, sketches, plans, invoices, work sheets, and photographs for sculptures.
What's in the entire collection?
The Aaronel deRoy Gruber Papers and Photographs documents the professional career of Aaronel deRoy Gruber, as well as the respective and combined lives of the DeRoy and Gruber families. The bulk of the collection documents deRoy Gruber’s artistic career through files maintained by the artist of past exhibits, exhibition programs, contracts and associations, artist’s statements, artwork slides, correspondence, publicity, biographies and curricula, and deRoy Gruber's personal collection of artworks.
About Aaronel deRoy Gruber.
Aaronel deRoy Gruber (1918-2011) was an internationally recognized artist who spent her career in Pittsburgh. Starting as an abstract painter in the early 1950s, she moved into sculpture and photography over a six-decade career. Skilled in various materials, she became known as an innovator in acrylic and plexiglass. She exhibited in many one-person and group exhibitions in the United States and abroad. Her work is in more than 800 private and public collections, including the Smithsonian Institution, the DeCordova Museum, the Carnegie Museum of Art, and the Butler Institute of American Art.
Aaronel deRoy Gruber is from one of the oldest Jewish families in Western Pennsylvania, although she notably capitalized her surname differently than the remainder of her well-known family. She was the daughter of Joseph Israel DeRoy (1874-1934), a dentist, and Bessie Leyser DeRoy (1889-1980), of Mississippi. deRoy Gruber had two sisters, Marion and Helen.
In 1940, deRoy Gruber earned a Bachelor of Science in Costume Economics from Carnegie Institute of Technology, where she studied design with Robert Lepper, color theory with Wilfred Readio, and painting with Samuel Rosenberg. She also briefly studied at the Traphagen School of Design in New York City and worked as a Fashion Coordinator at Kaufmann’s Department Store.
Gruber began her career in art as an abstract painter and was a founding member of the abstract art association Group A. Aaronel married Irving Gruber, who later became president of American Forge & Manufacturing, on January 24, 1940. The couple had three children, Jon, Terry, and Jamie.
deRoy Gruber was inspired to work with steel in the 1960s after being introduced to American abstract sculptor David Smith by Pittsburgh artist and critic Harry Schwalb at an awards dinner following the 1961 Associated Artists of Pittsburgh annual exhibit at the Carnegie Museum of Art. Smith encouraged deRoy Gruber to work with steel scraps. Her first forays into sculpture incorporated imposing consolidations of steel scraps, using the resources available to her through American Forge & Manufacturing. In the early 1970s, she began to use plastic in her work and later combined steel and plexiglass. She turned to photography in the late 1980s. Her later work includes black and white infra-red panorama photographs of both landscape and architecture. Her life’s work can be found at https://aaronel.com/, a website dedicated to preserving and promoting her legacy. The Irving and Aaronel Gruber Foundation was founded on November 2, 2000 with a mission to support and promote Aaronel deRoy Gruber’s work. The Foundation also accepts her works of art.