Hedy Pagremanski, 94-year-old Holocaust survivor, immortalizes Long Beach with paintings

For more than half a century, Hedy Pagremanski — perched on a folding chair and equipped with paintbrushes and an easel — painstakingly captured New York City’s architecture, street scenes and denizens. But for any passersby who wanted to be portrayed on her canvas, there was one condition: They must first tell the street artist their “story.”

“While working on the street, people would ask, ‘Can I be put into the painting?’ ” Pagremanski, 94, of Long Beach, recalled. “I said, ‘If I draw you, I need a statement of how you see yourself, not how the world sees you.’ ”

Pagremanski, a mostly self-trained artist, said her passion is preserving and recording people and places through her artwork. In the city, many of her paintings focused on the Lower East Side, along with attractions such as the South Street Seaport and Lincoln Center and landmarks like the Plaza Hotel. Her work has been exhibited at the Fraunces Tavern Museum, the Tenement Museum and the Museum of the City of New York, as well as in galleries, films, books and private collections, including commissions for the New York Stock Exchange and Goldman Sachs.

Though the grandmother of three no longer travels into Manhattan, she shows no sign of slowing down. For more than 40 years, she has been immortalizing Long Beach street scenes on canvas. Currently, she is working on a painting set on the city’s iconic boardwalk packed with people she has met or knows well.

And since the pandemic, she has been broadcasting a weekly Facebook Live event, “Mondays With Hedy,” where she discusses her work with about 60 subscribers and shares her thoughts about the need for compassion and acceptance to create a more just and equitable society.

Pagremanski’s son, Ken Page-Romer, 67, also of Long Beach, said his mother’s love of people inspires her work. “She wants to change the world through her art,” he said. “She shows the humanity of her subjects so people can feel love for them.”

Fled the Nazis in 1938

Born in 1929, Pagremanski grew up Jewish in Vienna, Austria. In 1938, the same year Austria was annexed by Nazi Germany, she said her family fled persecution and took refuge in Panama.

When she turned 17, she said she moved to Chicago and in 1948, she married her late husband, Eric Page, a Holocaust survivor (though their name was legally shortened to Page when they became U.S. citizens, she continues to use Pagremanski in her work). From Chicago, it was on to New York City, where Pagremanski said she studied at the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Art Students League of New York.

But after a few short months, she said she dropped out. “We were told to paint posed models, and I wanted to paint real people,” she recalled.

From New York City, the couple moved to upstate Pine Bush and then Oceanside, before settling in Long Beach in 1980.

Pagremanski said she started painting in earnest in 1973.

She identified closely with the immigrant, working-class neighborhood of the Lower East Side, which became the focal point of her work. “I was fascinated by the Lower East Side because I was a refugee,” she said. “To me, America was where everyone else was a refugee also.”

In her paintings, she portrayed homeless people as well as old buildings, some that have since been torn down. “I was drawn to them when I began to paint the large canvases of my city,” she said. “I sensed that this was what I needed to do to preserve them.”

Pagremanski’s family and friends said her experiences as a child in Nazi-occupied Austria shaped her as a person and an artist.

When Nazi troops marched into Austria, Pagremanski said she “didn’t understand why people at the grocery store were friendly, yet the Nazis were not and were supposed to be dangerous. I thought they [the Nazis] had to be the people who didn’t know us because the people who knew us wouldn’t hurt us.”

That time in her life, she said, inspired her to paint only “real” people who told her their “story.”

Johanna Mathieson-Ellmer, director of the Long Beach-based Artists in Partnership and a longtime friend of the street artist, said Pagremanski insists that “if she paints you, you have to give her your story so that she knows who you are and that others know you, too.”

She noted that the artist also feels it’s important to paint buildings and people so that they “live beyond their life span.”

“People disappear and buildings disappear because of gentrification, but we still have the visuals,” said Mathieson-Ellmer, whose organization recognized Pagremanski’s contributions to the arts with a lifetime achievement award in 2017. “When I look at her paintings, I can feel the life and vibrancy and hear the city’s sounds.”

Pagremanski’s daughter, JoAnne Page, 69, of Freeport, said she often drove her mother, whom she described as a “locus of warmth and positivity,” to Manhattan to paint. “She’s had years of painting on street corners, and many of the people she has painted are now extended family to her,” Page said. “The painting she is working on now probably has 100 people in it, and she has relationships with all of them.”

During the artist’s career, she has volunteered to teach inmates how to draw at the Nassau County Jail in East Meadow and Sing Sing Correctional Facility in Ossining. Standing in her home filled with her paintings and countless sketches, she pointed to a framed drawing of a young female prisoner leaning against the metal bars of a jail cell with her hands dangling.

“We all need to use our hands in life, and many of the inmates’ hands were not doing anything,” said Pagremanski, who noted that a number of prisoners she worked with had hidden artistic talent. “They were excited by things they could do, like trace their finger or sketch leaves and branches.”

Painting Long Beach

From the late 1970s until 2003, she and her late husband ran Follow Your Art, a Long Beach picture framing shop, where she also offered private art instruction.

Although she has lived in Long Beach since the 1980s, she said she didn’t paint her hometown at first because she thought it “wasn’t interesting.” Buildings in Long Beach lacked the character and history of the New York City architecture, she said. “But people fascinate me.”

In 1982, she turned her attention to painting Long Beach and the vicinity. Over the years, Pagremanski has worked on several paintings set on Nassau’s barrier island.

In 2000, she painted “Long Beach Marches Into the Millennium,” which depicts people who worked in several local grassroots organizations along with former State Assemb. Harvey Weisenberg and his family and the late Edmund Buscemi, a former city councilman and police commissioner.

In another painting set on a stretch of Park Avenue, she portrayed a local bagel shop and residents she said she had met at the Magnolia Senior Community Center, where she had enrolled in exercise classes, and others from the Long Beach Reach, a nonprofit family service center.

Who's who

Intent on recording the identities of the people she paints, Pagremanski keeps a chart that assigns each person a number, with their corresponding story.

One is Kent Almqvist, 67. In the summer of 1980, the Swedish native, then 24, was on vacation in New York City when, unbeknownst to Pagremanski, he snapped a photo of her “sitting and painting an amazing painting” outside the Plaza Hotel.

In 2021, the father of two posted the image and other photos from his trip to a Facebook group where members display their pictures of New York City in the 1970s and '80s. After an acquaintance of Page-Romer’s showed him the image, he alerted his mother, who contacted Almqvist. The following year, Almqvist met Pagremanski for the first time in Long Beach and then visited her again this past September.

“I feel like I have known her all my life, but I only met her twice,” said the retired project manager. He added that Pagremanski also portrayed his wife and two children in the same painting he is in, set on the city’s boardwalk.

Ed Weidman, 67, of Huntington, is also pictured among the throng of people in her latest Long Beach painting. He said Pagremanski was spot-on in capturing his image.

“She has recorded New York City for decades — a New York City that no longer exists,” said the retired salesman and photographer. “She’s recorded the streets and hundreds upon hundreds of people that she knew individually.”

On a recent Saturday, Pagremanski discussed her latest painting as she dabbed paint on a canvas beside a large picture window in her home. As she worked on coloring her neighbor’s shirt, she reflected on what her late husband, Eric, told her before his death in 2016.

“He told me someday, when all of us of this generation are gone, and people wonder about who you were. ... Other generations will just think of the Holocaust and shootings in schools, but they won’t know the kind of people that we were,” she recalled. “He said, ‘Let’s do a painting … but let’s make sure that you only do real people in this.’ ”

He worried, however, that people looking at the painting years later would say she invented the people she depicted, Pagremanski recalled. “So when I paint somebody, I make sure I get their story so it’s proof that this person existed.”