Martha Mayer Erlebacher

Martha Mayer Erlebacher (1937 - 2013) was born in Jersey City, New Jersey and earned her BA in industrial design and her MFA at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. She and her husband, sculptor Walter Erlebacher, taught at Pratt until 1966, at which time the couple relocated to Philadelphia, each of them having accepted a teaching position at the Philadelphia College of Art (now the University of the Arts). Martha taught at the University of the Arts until 1993, although by that time she had already joined the faculty of the New York Academy of Art, a school dedicated to classical training in the figurative arts. There she served in leadership positions through 2006, contributing substantially to the development of the academic curriculum. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and is included in the collections of many museums, including Woodmere, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Yale University Art Gallery, the Fogg Museum at Harvard University, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and many others.