Aaronel deRoy Gruber

Aaronel DeRoy Gruber worked in painting, sculpture and photography. She started out as an Abstract Expressionist painter in the 1960s, moved to Op painting, but it was her move into Plexiglas sculptures that brought her the most acclaim. In the 1980s, she started to explore landscape photography. Influenced by her mother Bessie's clothes-making skills, Aaronel went to Carnegie Institute of Technology for fashion and clothes-making. In 1940, she married Irv Gruber, he would go on to run a steel forging business. Aaronel was greatly influenced by local artist Samuel Rosenberg. An experimental painting using her children's toy "Bill Ding" began a lifelong interest in toy collecting for the couple. It was sculptor David Smith, in the late 1960s, who encouraged her to use the steel from her husband's plant to create large abstract sculptures, many of which decorate the parks of Pittsburgh today. Many of these sculptures used open rounded squares including the example in our collection of which we also have the model for it. After this time she started to explore working with plastics and Plexiglas, she created many works of kinetic colored Plexiglas sculptures. In the early 1980s, encouraged by her son Terry, a professional photographer, she began to seriously explore photography as an artistic medium.

In 2010, she once again created a Plexiglas sculpture when she collaborated with an artist named Deanna Mance to create the piece "Mixologists," made for the Associated Artists of Pittsburgh Centennial Exhibition in January 2010. She made the sculpture form in the 1980s, and Mance added drawn elements and tiny toys and baby-doll parts to the interior, a nod to Gruber's toy collection.

Aaronel also created sculptural jewelry, a selection of which was also taken for the collection.