by Deborah Rosenberger

From the streets of Brooklyn to a one-room schoolhouse in Cherokee County, Oklahoma, Sandra (Riesberg) Bierman's life experiences have been widely diverse. Her father was an immigrant from Sweden and her mother was a Texas farm girl. Sandra's parents were divorced when she was four. Bierman grew up mainly in Houston, Texas, but she was introduced to a variety of environments as a young child due to poverty and an unstable home life. Her mother had Schizophrenia and Sandra lived on and off with her maternal grandmother and pseudo foster families until high school when she was on her own. Bierman's grandmother was the only consistently caring and loving person in her childhood and appears in many of Bierman's paintings.

Bierman attended a different school every year, usually moving in the middle of the school year, except for her last two years of high school. She describes herself as being lucky that she was born with gifts to survive her childhood. “One gift was my artistic talent, but the ability to reason and the will to overcome were also valuable.” As a sensitive child she found solace in her ability to draw, sometimes on walls or broken furniture when her school notebook paper ran out. “When things were bleak I would go off by myself in a corner, on a bed or in a tree and draw my heart out,” she said.

The golden thread of her artistic talent followed her and in that genre she gained pride. As a young girl her art won many awards in both city and national competitions, and a few of these prized works landed a spot in local museum exhibitions.

At 16 Bierman moved to Maryland to live with a great-aunt. In high school she was coerced into a clerical, commercial track, but the only studies she was interested in were literature, creative writing and art. Bierman's art teacher was very supportive and fought for an art scholarship for her, and upon graduation from high school she was awarded a full 4-year scholarship to the Maryland Institute of Art.

Bierman's art education was cut short when she married a Naval Academy midshipman. Several years later at the age of 24 she had three children and lived in New Jersey. During the 1960's Bierman attended art school part-time and studied with the late John Grabach. Single in the 1970's, she moved to New York and studied evenings at the Art Students League while beginning a new career in corporate Telecommunications.

Nine years later Bierman was a V.P. at Chase Manhattan Bank in the New York Operations headquarters, developing global training media for in-house users. "But I had forsaken my art. There was no room for art and a corporate career. I had become a work-a-holic and later realized I had not painted for almost 20 years...maybe it was gone? But I had a vision of myself as being an artist grandma some day, a Sunday painter.Ó

In 1983 Sandra married the love of her life, Arthur Bierman a Physics Professor. They both retired and moved to Boulder CO in 1988. "Finally, I can get back into my art -- become a 'Sunday painter', thought Sandra. But she soon found herself in another career as an oil painter, and we all know the rest of the story.

Women's Magazine/December 1993