The word “authentic” comes up often in discussions of art and artists. I suspect it’s because, for many of us, art is the Holy Grail that represents above all the search for truth. We have largely lost our faith in politics, religion, world leaders, doctors, lawyers, and psychoanalysts as guides and authorities. Searching for truth seems to be what real artists do while acknowledging that it may not be found or even recognized. The search matters, even when it discovers that art and the world are defined and experienced by contradiction and change.

Words are clumsy instruments to define experience, but when I look at Miriam’s work, the words that come to mind are abundance and devotion. Art is not usually served by literary description, but I found it interesting to list the words used to describe the work by a group of women artists in a show curated by Miriam in 1996. The exhibit was entitled “The Inner Lives of Women: Psyche, Spirit and Soul:”

Soulful, illumination, inner awareness, courage, spiritual warriors, joy and beauty, intuition and dreams, primal, chaos, death, loss, relationship, transformation, healing, inner realms, archetypal memories, the divine, sacredness, innocence, vulnerability, awareness, searching, creation and destruction, meditation, compassion, mortality, paradox.

Not coincidentally, these very words create the atmosphere that Miriam’s work inhabits. Above all, she has recognized that the search for truth never ends and has devoted her life to that search with patience and persistence.
Thirty years ago, I wrote a short introduction to an article on Miriam’s work in a Japanese magazine. I said in part:

The work evokes a kind of sensate garden filled with the heavy smell of lush flowers and ripening fruits. In some cases, a darkening sense of decay suggests a more ominous presence. There are other contradictions; innocence and cynicism, refinement and crudity and, perhaps most fundamentally, the material versus the spiritual.

Viewed from the present, the work has matured and intensified, but perhaps most remarkable is Miriam’s commitment to her path. She has never wavered. Artistic authenticity emerges slowly and depends, in part, on resisting what the world wants you to be. After a long voyage, Miriam has arrived at herself.

• Milton Glaser