Abel Posse
Abel Parentini Posse was born on 7 January 1934, in the Argentine city of Córdoba where he only lived the first two years of his life. Two years after birth the family moved to the capital city of Buenos Aires due to his father's work commitments. His mother, Elba Alicia Posse, belonged to the creole landed oligarchy of Galician descent who held vast sugar mill estates in the North West province of Tucuman. Amongst the influential members of the Posse clan in the 19th century, the liberal Julio Argentino Roca stands out, twice president of the republic from 1880 to 1886 and also 1898 to 1904 (3). Posse fictionalized 19th century Tucuman in his novel El inquietante día de la vida (2001), where two distant family relatives are the protagonists; his maternal great-grandfather, Felipe Segundo Posse, and Julio Victor Posse, patron of the arts in the sugar producing province until the 1940s.
Sigmund Abeles
Born in Brooklyn, New York City, Abeles grew up in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. The only child of Samuel and Henrietta Abeles, he was named after his grandfather, a renowned Orthodox rabbi who immigrated to the United States from Hungary in 1901. His father, a Hungarian Jew, was a decorated World War I veteran who used his pension to open up a retail business in Sheeps Head Bay. His mother was of Polish-Jewish descent and worked as a librarian before her marriage. After his parents divorced early on in his life, he moved to Myrtle Beach with his mother where she started a new life by opening up a rooming house called Paul's Guest House on US Highway 17. Spending a great deal of time alone in the rooming house, Sigmund grew a fascination for how many types of people occupy the same domain which had a huge impact and direction on his artwork took. Sigmund Abeles received no formal art training in the public schools at Myrtle Beach. Searching for inspiration, Abeles found Brookgreen Gardens, an outdoor sculpture park, which provided him with a multitude of beautiful bronze and marble figures to sketch; years later, as an established artist, he had his life-sized bronze sculpture, “ Kaethe, age 9” (modeled in 1968 and later cast in Bronze in 2006), placed in Brookgreen’s permanent collection. Abeles was invited later to hold a major solo exhibition there in 2015 called "Carolina Roots". During his high school years, Sigmund was mentored by Truman Moore Sr., a wood sculptor, who pointed him towards the Boston artist Gerard Francis Tempest whom he later apprenticed with.Abeles attended the University of South Carolina, initially for pre-medical studies to appease his mother but he later switched to art studies. There he met Jasper Johns, an upper classman and became long term acquaintances. They shared the same art professors, Edmund Yaghijian and Catharine Rembert. In 1952, Abeles attended Pratt Institute in Brooklyn for only one semester because his mother would only allow him to study commercial art. In the summer of 1954, determined to pursue his love for fine arts and figurative study, he attended the Art Students League of New York where he was taught by Reginald Marsh, Morris Kantor and Harry Sternberg. In 1955, he received a scholarship to the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine. He worked under Edwin Dickinson and Isabel Bishop. There he also made lifelong friendships with fellow students Sidney Hurwitz, Philip Grausman, Jerome Witkin and Ashley Bryan. In 1957, he received another scholarship to study at Columbia University where he received his MFA in Painting in just one year.