Stepping into the Creative World of Artist Mimi Gross, Passover and Beyond

This blog is published in association with the annual Passover exhibit featuring art from the Rose Family Seder Books on display March 29–May 4, 2025 in the McGraw Rotunda of the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building. The Rose Family Seder Books are unique collections of Passover-themed artwork commissioned from some of the most prominent American artists.

Encountering Mimi Gross’s colorful and vibrant painting of the Seder plate in the Rose Family Seder book was a moment of great joy. Fascinated, I quickly discovered more of Mimi Gross’s exuberant and cheerful art through her website, other online resources, and materials at The New York Public Library—and I was immediately charmed. I then looked further for Jewish themes in her works, which led me to explore Judaism in the art of her celebrated father, Chaim Gross (1902–1991), an American sculptor born in Galicia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Chaim Gross, a descendant of a Hasidic family, immigrated to the United States in 1921 to escape war-devastated Europe. Chaim’s art is marked by avant-garde perspectives on the human body and movement, carved from wood, alabaster, plaster, and bronze. The Jewish theme was a continuous presence in his art but was especially bold in his early works created while still in Europe.

Mimi Gross is a famous and big artist in her own right, and her artistic personality is very distinctive from her father’s. Her works are experimental and theatrical, extravagant and colorful, and cover various genres and techniques. They are natural and warm, touched with a sense of humor and wisdom.

Mimi Gross's art is featured in the Passover display at the iconic Stephen A. Schwarzman Building's McGraw Rotunda this year, from March 29 to May 4. I decided to contact Mimi Gross in person, initially just to ask her to share recollections about working on the Rose Family Seder Books. What a wonderful decision it turned out to be! Mimi responded almost instantly and invited me to her studio in downtown Manhattan. When I arrived at Mimi’s place a few days later, I found myself, quite unexpectedly, in a huge, beautiful, sunlit, welcoming universe of the artist. I almost felt like a child entering an enchanting fairytale kingdom. Mimi’s works—much like characters from a fairytale, small and large, some giant, many three-dimensional—occupied nearly every inch of the studio's space and walls, collectively creating an atmosphere of joy, peace, and harmony.

Here, over a cup of coffee and cake, Mimi and I talked—about many things. About Mimi’s childhood in an artistic family in Manhattan, the Yiddish language spoken by her parents, her Jewish education at the Sunday School at the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue on the Upper West Side, her studies as a pianist at the pre-college division of the Manhattan School of Music, and her eventual decision to become an artist, leading her to attend the High School for Music & Art, now known as the Fiorello H. LaGuardia School for Music & Art. We also talked about her travels around the world to study art, about the importance of self-education, self-search, and experimentation, and her art-making, which Mimi characterized as an inseparable and natural part of existence—like breathing. 

I asked Mimi about her work on the Rose Family Seder book. A few weeks before Passover holiday in 1988, she was approached by Elihu Rose, at whose home the seder was about to take place, to illustrate allocated seven pages in the family's seder album. Mimi took the commission extremely seriously and studied the subject of Passover in incredible detail. Mimi recalls browsing through the previous pages of the album done by other contemporary artists analyzing their Passover works while working on her own. The result was eye-grabbing.

On current display at the exhibit is the Passover plate, with all its traditional components, which takes center stage in a spread of two large pages. The plate, along with shmurah (unleavened bread), a glass of wine, and a candle (which evokes the burning bush), is displayed against the backdrop of a phantasmagoric Passover tablecloth. The painting features key motifs from the Haggadah, such as the 10 plagues, the cabins in Egypt, and the parting of the Red Sea. It is also decorated with yellow and blue dots encircling the table setting, representing the various phases of the moon during the Exodus. As a whole, this spectacular watercolor evokes a striking theater curtain, celebrating the religious and universal humanistic values of the Book of Exodus in an intense, theatrical atmosphere.