Minna Harkavy

Minna Harkavy (November 13, 1887 – 1987) (birth occasionally listed as 1895[1][2]) was an American sculptor.

She was born in Estonia to Yoel and Hannah Rothenberg[3] and immigrated to the United States around 1900.[4] She studied at the Art Students League, at Hunter College and in Paris with Antoine Bourdelle.[5]

Harkavy was a WPA Federal Art Project artist, for whom she created a 1942 wood relief piece, Industry and Landscape of Winchendon for the post office in Winchendon, Massachusetts.[6]

She was a founding member of the Sculptors Guild and showed a work, My Children are Desolate Because the Enemy Prevailed in the Second Outdoor Sculpture Exhibition[7] Negro Head in the 1940-1941[8] and Woman in Thought in 1941.[9]

Harkavy was a founding member of the New York Society of Women Artists. Politically she was known as a leftist and anti-fascist with a strong social consciousness. In 1931 she exhibited a bust of Hall Johnson in the Museum of Western Art in Moscow and the work was purchased for the Pushkin Museum there.[10] In 1932 she represented the John Reed Club at an anti-war conference in Amsterdam.[3]

A bust of Italian-American anti-fascist (and her lover[3]) Carlo Tresca who was assassinated in New York in 1943 was installed in his birthplace of Sulmona, Italy.[10]

She was one of 250 sculptors who exhibited in the 3rd Sculpture International held at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in the summer of 1949.

She married Louis Harkavy, a New York pharmacist who also wrote for Yiddish-language periodicals.