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96-YEAR-OLD PATIENT AND ARTIST DONATES
PAINTINGS TO SCHEIE By Rebecca Salowe
Hilda Friedman, 96-year-old visual artist, is a longtime patient of the Scheie Eye Institute. Recently, she donated three large paintings to be displayed in waiting areas at the Institute.
watercolor phase of her work. “I was very interested in color at that time,” she explained. “It was just becoming big in cinematography and films. I came into contact with every face of printmaking and color.”
A Philadelphia native, Hilda grew up in a row house in South Philadelphia with her parents and three older sisters. As a child, she loved to draw (especially her grandmother’s cat), but her family did not have the money to provide her with art training. “My father was a nature lover and taught me a lot,” she recalled. “My mother was artistic, but it was the Depression years.”
When she reflects on the watercolor phase of her work today, Hilda marvels at the vast size of these pieces. “I used to do watercolors that were 40 by 60 inches,” she said. “I mean, you have to be crazy to do a watercolor that size. How did I do that? It just came from within.”
Hilda attended South Philly High School and obtained her BA on a scholarship from Hobart and William Smith College. She married young to her late husband, Eli Friedman, who was a pharmacist. At the time, married women were not allowed to live in the school dormitories, so Hilda and her husband rented a small apartment. When Hilda first took up art in the 1950s, not many people in her family took her interest seriously—but she was not deterred. She went on to study drawing at the Tyler School of Art at Temple University, which led to the
Hilda also pursued education in lithography and printmaking at the Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, silkscreening at the Fabric Workshop, and art history at the Barnes Foundation. During this time, Hilda taught classes at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Wayne Art Center, and St. Joseph’s University. “They sent kids to me thinking that I can make them into artists, but it doesn’t work like that,” she said. “So I tried to get the children interested in work other than just the prints of their fingers.” In the 1970s, Hilda experienced a sudden loss of half of
