Biography

The art of Inez Storer opens a world of endless possibility through its dreamlike imagery, rich colors, and fanciful characters. Like enthusiastic patrons at the season’s latest show, viewers are invited to enter her visual drama only to discover that the seemingly optimistic and charmingly naïve surface of her work cloaks a reality that is far less benign than it appears. Using images culled from abandoned memories and unknown fantasies, Storer creates a complex narrative in which histories, lived and unlived, are woven together in an exploration of identity, imagination, and spirituality.

The children of two European émigrés, Storer and her brother grew up in a creative, bohemian environment. Her father, a trained architect, had fled Hitler’s regime with his young wife to come to the United States, where he took a job as an art director for Paramount Studios. Upon leaving Germany, Storer’s mother, who had been a dancer and would later become an author, severed all ties with her Jewish family out of fear of the far-reaching arm of Hitler’s anti-Semitic policy. Raised in the Roman Catholic church, Storer and her brother were kept from knowing about their family’s rich history throughout their early childhood.

Storer did not learn of her family’s heritage until age 14 or 15, although she had sensed something beneath the surface well before then. The truth came to light while Storer was working at a dress shop in Santa Monica. She had a difficult encounter with the owner’s father and when she relayed the incident to her parents she slipped into a Yiddish accent, causing her mother to run from the table. Not knowing what she had done, Storer asked her father if she was Jewish. He replied “yes” but told her never to mention it again.1 Unable to fully reconcile her family’s heritage with her Catholic upbringing, Storer became fascinated with her untold past.2

Histories (1996) addresses the discovery of her past and her ensuing search for identity. In this work, Storer openly explores the complexities of her spiritual identity. Here, a young female figure, representing Storer, kneels in the traditional Catholic prayer position. A silvery band covers her eyes like a blindfold, suggesting that secrets have been kept from her. Below her hovering body sits a menorah—her Jewish identity visible only if she dares peek out from beneath the blindfold. A small, red devotional painting stands before her. The picture-within-a-picture focuses on the profile of a young child, whose identifying features have been painted over as if he, too, has been kept from the truth. Through these pointed images, the artist struggles to reclaim her lost identity. Immersed in a fantastical dream and painted with a beguiling naïveté, the figure in Histories suggests the innocence that Storer possessed as a child protected from the hedgy details of her family’s past. But, like the girl’s blindfold, the illusion of protection is only temporary.

An interest in personal history informs Storer’s work throughout her career. In her paintings we are confronted with idiosyncratic images that represent both what is and what could be as the artist explores the inner world of the individual. Religious icons and relics—Christian and Jewish—figure strongly in her work, alongside fantastical, floating figures. The scenes are theatrical and dreamlike—elements are suspended in anonymous space, denied footing in the natural world. Yet each work seems to play its part in the belabored construction of an unknown past. Eyes turned to her own history, Storer embarks on a lyrical journey of self-revelation in which the realms of possibility are opened and the influence of past experience on personal identity is called into question. —L.W.

1. Meredith Tromble, “A Past, A Prince, A Poet: The Discoveries of Inez Storer,” Inez Storer: Implied Histories (Fresno: Fresno Art Museum, 1999), 7.
2. Shortly after her mother’s death in 1999, Storer was contacted by two women who claimed to be her cousins. Their grandmother was the sister of Storer’s grandfather. The two women had been sent to England on the Kindertransport, which allowed children between the ages of 5 and 17 to escape Germany and temporarily relocate to Great Britain. The women eventually reunited with their parents and immigrated to the United States in 1940.

(SJMA Selections publication, 2004)

Inez Storer was born and grew up in Santa Monica. She received her B.A. from Dominican College in San Rafael and her M.A. from San Francisco State University. Since 1981 she has taught at the San Francisco Art Institute. Storer has been featured in one-person exhibitions at Catharine Clark Gallery in San Francisco and Susan Cummins Gallery in Mill Valley. She was recently the subject of a one-person exhibition at the Fresno Art Museum. Her work is included in the collections of the Oakland Museum of California and the Lannan Museum in Fort Worth, Florida. Histories will complement the other Storer work in the Museum’s permanent collection, El Ave de Paraiso (The Bird of Paradise) from 1992. (SJMA Collections Committee, 2000)

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