Barbara Milman1941-2019It was just a year before her death on July 24 that the artist Barbara Milman published "The Memory Palace", her illustrated novella "interweaving fantasy, the natural world," in the words of a reviewer, "and the reflections of a narrator who is facing death – her own and that of the planet—with courage, humor and outrage." She was 78.
The book capped Milman's double career, the first as a lawyer, beginning with civil rights work in the Mississippi of the 1960s; private practice with her first husband, Jonathan Shapiro, and others in Boston; as counsel to a Massachusetts Commission investigating corruption in the state's public housing program, and ending as chief counsel to the California Fair Political Practices Commission and its Assembly Rules Committee in 1993.
In 1994, she made a complete switch, quitting the bar to devote full time to the art that she said was always her great love, particularly printmaking and handmade artist's books, much of it created in her studio in El Cerrito, CA. Later she told an interviewer that her legal career was "a 25-year detour."
Over time, she produced more than 36 artist books in small editions. They are notable for their mix of printmaking, collage, and digital techniques, often in counterpoint with short but powerful texts and striking page designs. They're now in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Museum of Women in the Arts and Yad Vashem in Jerusalem and figure in the Special Collections of over 35 university libraries. Perhaps her most important work was the artist's book "Light in the Shadows", later issued as an illustrated volume with the same name by Jonathan David Publishers.
She had scores of solo exhibitions, was artist in residence at institutions both in this country and in Europe, taught printmaking and won numerous awards.
"My printmaking," she wrote, "is based on traditional relief, especially linocuts, which I mix with other printmaking techniques, including digitally based methods. My artist's books combine hand printmaking with digital and photographic elements. I transfer images between the prints and the artist books. The works in the two media complement and reinforce each other."
But the art, like much of the legal work, was always infused with social passion, the Holocaust, prisoners' rights, and particularly, in recent years, the environment and the extinction of species. The ironic theme of "The Memory Palace" is a museum devoted to extinct birds and the stories they tell about their own extinction. Not coincidentally, perhaps, her second husband, Daniel Rancour-Laferriere, a writer and Russian scholar, whom she married in 1979, is a birder.
Barbara Milman was born on June 2, 1941, in Great Neck, N.Y., the daughter of Howard and Charlotte (Cohen) Milman. She is a graduate cum laude of Harvard in 1963 and of the Columbia University Law School, in 1966. She leaves her husband, two children, Paul Shapiro of Brooklyn, N.Y., and Lara Shapiro of Marina del Rey, CA., two grandchildren, a sister, Dorothy Mermin, of Ithaca, N.Y., and a brother, Andrew Milman of Melbourne, Fla.