Bernece Berkman
Bernece Berkman-Hunter (1911–1988) was an American painter and artist born in Chicago. She is best known for paintings that show the struggles of industrial workers and the poor during the Great Depression.
She studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and took evening classes with Todros Geller, learning oil painting. Influenced by Rudolph Weisenborn, she explored Cubism and Expressionism in her work. Berkman-Hunter also studied briefly in New York at Hunter College and The New School for Social Research with Stuart Davis.
Her work was first shown in 1934 in a group exhibit of Jewish artists at the Palmer House in Chicago. In 1939 she exhibited a painting at the New York World’s Fair, and in 1940 her work appeared in the MoMA show American Color Prints Under $10, which aimed to bring affordable fine art to the public.
In 1946 she married Oscar H. Hunter, an African-American writer, and together they started a wallpaper company, Berk-Hunter Associates, in 1949. They divorced in 1976. Berkman-Hunter participated in the 1947 Dallas Museum of Fine Arts exhibition of National Serigraph Society artists.
She traveled to France and Italy in 1972, and her travel diary is housed in the Library of Congress. She remained active in the Chicago and New York art communities and belonged to the Chicago Society of Artists and the Chicago Women’s Salon.
Bernece Berkman-Hunter died in 1988 in New York.
This page was last edited on 3 February 2026, at 08:18 (CET).