Mara Devereux

Mara Devereux was born on June 9, 1925, in Brooklyn, New York, to Jewish parents of Russian descent who were both carnival stunt performers.

She began to study art at the Brooklyn Museum when she was eight years old, primarily as a means to stay warm in the New York winter.

The WPA was one of many programs designed to counter the ravages of the depression in the thirties and sponsored classes at the museum.

Her focus quickly went in the direction of painting, though, and she began to develop a vocabulary that lent itself to abstract art.

She lived around and with many prominent people, having at one time been married to a United States representative to NATO, and following that to pop artist Robert Dowd.

A musician as well as an artist, she played the bodhran, a Celtic hand-drum, in an Irish ensemble that opened once for the Grateful Dead in San Francisco.

[citation needed] She has been commissioned by the Lipton Tea Company, Bloomingdale's, Saks Fifth Avenue and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Art historian and Frederick R. Weisman Museum director Michael Zakian, became aware of Devereux when he started to put together a retrospective of her late husband's work.

Their residence at the Chelsea was based on an exchange; Dowd's works were on the walls in the lobby, and that enabled him and Devereux to live rent-free for a time.

In 2005, Mara Devereux collaborated with the charismatic Kazakh-American tenor Timur Bekbosunov on his multimedia theatrical fantasy, The Songs of the Mad Muezzin (based on the music of Karol Szymanowski), resulting in a new painting series, The Szymanowski Series, produced by the non-profit organization, Art of Opera.

She was painting mainly in watercolor at the time because of the portability of the materials, and there was no shortage of inspiration, as she had access to some of the world's great works and museums.

Several months after they married, Dowd took his work to a higher level of public awareness in a watershed moment at the Pasadena Art Museum in 1962.

New paintings of Common Objects featured Dowd as well as Roy Lichtenstein, Wayne Thiebaud, and Andy Warhol, and is the show that many consider to be the inaugural gala of the American Pop Art movement.