Aaronel deRoy Gruber (MM 1940)

2006 Alumni Achievement (Merit) Award

Bio

From childhood Aaronel was interested in drawing. She attended Wightman Elementary School and Taylor Allderdice High School in Pittsburgh’s Squirrel Hill. While earning a bachelor of science degree at Carnegie Institute of Technology, (now Carnegie Mellon) awarded in 1940, Aaronel studied with several outstanding professors in the institute’s College of Fine Arts: Samuel Rosenberg, Roy Hilton,Wilfred Readio, and Robert Lepper, who would also later inspire Andy Warhol and Philip Pearlstein.

Since her graduation from the Carnegie Institute of Technology, Aaronel deRoy Gruber has been creating art: paintings, steel and Plexiglas sculptures, and for many years, photographs. She again studied with Samuel Rosenberg in an experimental workshop. A social realist painter turned abstractionist, Rosenberg encouraged freedom of expression, analysis, and constructive critiques. He was a major force in Pittsburgh’s advanced art. Experimenting, Aaronel created gestural paintings on canvases that were sometimes twelve feet tall. She then began thrusting their surfaces forward in a three-dimensional, sculptural way.