Nyna Brael Polumbaum’s life has been filled with firsts.
She was in the first class of graduates from New York’s High School of Music and Art in 1940. She was one of the first families to form a utopian, cooperative community in Lincoln in 1956. She said she even owned the first large Epson printer “east of the Mississippi” in the 1990s.
Now she is the first 102-year-old to have an art exhibition at Gallery 93 in Brookline.
Through Aug. 28, Gallery 93 at the Brookline Senior Center is showcasing 20 of Polumbaum’s prints, all of which are for sale, with a public reception July 15 from 4 to 6 p.m.
She made most of the prints in the 1990s by pasting together mylar collages, scanning them, and digitally manipulating them in early versions of Photoshop. Only one is an intaglio print, which is an image created using a manual printmaking press. The collection is “one-of-a-kind,” Polumbaum said.
These prints reflect a time when Polumbaum transitioned from intaglio to digital printmaking because of arthritic pain in her hands. As an early adopter of computers, she started combining her artistic genius with technology.
“I was curious how they’d come out,” she said. “I was obsessed.”
Hilary Tolan, Gallery 93’s curator, said she was compelled by Polumbaum’s story and thought it was an incredible opportunity to showcase the work of someone in the latest years of life. Tolan said Polumbaum’s prints feel like they were made by hand, even though they were generated on a computer.
“Her work has a lot of layers to it, and a lot of play with color and abstraction,” Tolan said. “It’s just really dynamic and lively.”
‘A little genius’
Driven by curiosity and an interest in the world around her, Polumbaum has been creating and curating art nearly her entire life.
She was born and raised in New York City by her mother, who immigrated as an orphan from Belarus, and her father, who immigrated with his family from Ukraine. She discovered her interest in art as a student selected for the inaugural class of New York’s High School of Music and Art in 1936, now famously known as the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts.
“I wasn’t interested in art particularly,” Polumbaum said. “For some reason—I wasn’t really qualified—they chose me at the age of 12.”
Her daughter, Judy Polumbaum, disagreed. “She was a little genius,” she said. “She’d already skipped two grades.”
After high school, Polumbaum studied art and architecture at Cooper Union. She then pursued a master of fine arts in the Department of Drama at the Yale School of Fine Arts, one of only a few women in the school’s graduate programs. While in the program, she saw plays like “A Streetcar Named Desire” by Tennessee Williams and “All My Sons” by Arthur Miller before they went to Broadway, she said.
She left her studies early to move to Boston with her husband, Ted Polumbaum, whom she had met at Yale. He would go on to become a newswriter and famous freelance photojournalist, working frequently for LIFE magazine and The New York Times.
Her “eclectic repertoire,” as Judy calls it, grew over time to include drafting, painting, costume and set design, architecture and interior design, printmaking, and graphic design.
An architect inside & out
When they came to Boston, the Polumbaums first moved into an apartment in Coolidge Corner and then to a house in Newtonville. In 1953, while she was pregnant with Judy, Ted lost his newswriting job for taking the Fifth Amendment at a House Un-American Activities Committee hearing during the wave of anti-communism. It was during this time that they heard an ad on the radio for Brown’s Wood—a group of families forming a cooperative community in Lincoln .
She liked the cooperative’s vision and collective approach to living, all by unanimous voting, Polumbaum said. They became one of the first 23 families to clear the plot of land and build houses. She designed their mid-century modern home, using her skills as a trained architect.
They lived there for nearly 25 years until the cooperative fell apart, and then they moved to Cambridge. Polumbaum turned a house of five apartments into one cohesive home, knocking down part of the ceiling to create a huge studio, her daughter said.
“Mom always had this very, very refined aesthetic sense because of her training,” Judy said. Even when shag carpet and wallpaper became all the rage in the 1970s, Polumbaum never strayed from her style, her daughter said.
“She was always way ahead of the curve,” Judy said.
Ted died in 2001, and Nyna returned to Brookline in 2008. In her typical fashion, she remodeled her house in Brookline Village to fit her taste. She lives there now with plenty of room upstairs for some of her children and grandchildren, along with their partners and pets.
Activism through art
While raising her family and making art, Nyna remained a steadfast activist. She curated two international art exhibitions aimed at driving social change.
She organized “Artists in Exile,” an exhibition of artwork by political exiles, sponsored by the Boston Visual Artists Gallery in 1977. Polumbaum had met several artists during a visit to Chile three years before the bloody military coup of 1973. She said she returned years later to find some of them living in exile, while others were dead or missing. This inspired her to develop the exhibition, and she hired several of the exiled Chilean artists she had met.
In the 1980s, Nyna curated “Save Life on Earth,” a collaboration of artists with a shared concern about nuclear war. She said she conceived the idea, developed a blank format and invited artists from over 20 countries to submit designs. With the support of the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, the exhibition toured across Europe, Asia and North America.
Advice for a long life
Now, Polumbaum spends most of her days at home, keeping up with the news, watching films and listening to audiobooks. Her glaucoma and arthritis make it hard to create art anymore. She spends all day Sunday reading The New York Times with a magnifying glass, her daughter said.
Judy credits her mother’s sharp mind to reading and the fact that she stays in touch with current affairs. She values her independence.
“Everyone says, ‘How do you manage to live to 102?’ And she says, ‘I did nothing to live this long,’” Judy said. “But my theory is she’s so stubborn.”
Polumbaum said people should not worry about how to live so long because she did everything wrong and has still lived to 102 years old.
Even when it comes to her age, Nyna understates her accomplishments. She is a terrible self-promoter and never got a gallery to represent her because she was busy with her art, her family, and politics, Judy said.
“She just did all these things,” Judy said when looking over her mother’s old sketches. “It seemed so easy, and she never thought very much of her drafting skills. She always downplayed it, but I always thought they were really amazing.”