Transcript of Aaronel deRoy Gruber’s oral history interview with Kim Lacy Rogers of the Susquehanna Art Museum, 26 pages. deRoy Gruber talks about growing up in Squirrel Hill, visiting Geenville, Mississippi, how her parents met at the French Lick Resort in Indiana, how the Depression affected her father’s business and his mental health, her sister Marion DeRoy’s battle with polio, how Word War II and the Holocaust impacted her life and her work, her marriage to Irving Gruber, the birth of her three children, painting with Samuel Rosenberg, her education at Carnegie Institute of Technology, and studying with Robert Leper, Roy Hilton and Wilfred Readio. She also talks about the Bauhaus movement, her friendships with Edgar Kaufmann, Andy Warhol and Phillip Pearlstein, her job as a fashion coordinator at Kaufmann’s Department Store, her experience with communism and McCarthyism, the destruction of the Pittsburgh steel industry, how the environment around her affects her art, and using steel and Plexiglas to create sculptures.
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