Minna Harkavy (née Minna Rothenberg; November 13, 1887 – 1987; birth occasionally listed as 1895)Rubenstein, Charlotte Streifer, American Women Sculptors, G.K. Hall & Co., Boston, 1990, p. 266McGlauflin, Alice Coe, ed., Who's Who in American Art 1938–1939 vol.2, The American Federation of Arts, Washington D.C., 1937 was an Estonia-born American sculptor.
Biography Harkavy was born in Estonia to Yoel and Hannah Rothenberg and immigrated to the United States around 1900. She studied at the Art Students League of New York, at Hunter College, and in Paris with Antoine Bourdelle.Opitz, Glenn B, Editor, Mantle Fielding's Dictionary of American Painters, Sculptors & Engravers, Apollo Book, Poughkeepsie NY, 1986
Harkavy was a WPA Federal Art Project artist, for whom she created a 1942 wood relief piece, Industry and Landscape of Winchendon for the post office in Winchendon, Massachusetts.Park, Marlene and Gerald E. Markowitz, Democratic Vistas: Post Offices and Public Art in the New Deal, Temple University Press, Philadelphia, 1984, p. 214
She was a founding member of the Sculptors Guild and showed a work, My Children are Desolate Because the Enemy Prevailed in the Second Outdoor Sculpture ExhibitionSculptors Guild Second Outdoor Exhibition: 1939, The Sculptors' Guild, New York, 1939, p. 50 Negro Head in the 1940–1941Sculptors' Guild Travelling Exhibition: 1940-194, The Sculptors' Guild, New York, 1940, p. 26 and Woman in Thought in 1941.Sculptors Guild Third Outdoor Sculpture Exhibition: 1941, The Sculptors' Guild, New York, 1941, p. 25
Harkavy was a founding member of the New York Society of Women Artists. Politically she was known as a leftist and anti-fascist with a strong social consciousness. In 1931 she exhibited a bust of Hall Johnson in the Museum of Western Art in Moscow and the work was purchased for the Pushkin Museum there.Rubenstein, Charlotte Streifer, American Women Sculptors, G.K. Hall & Co., Boston, 1990, pp. 266–267 In 1932 she represented the John Reed Club at an anti-war conference in Amsterdam.
A bust of Italian-American anti-fascist (and her lover) Carlo Tresca who was assassinated in New York in 1943 was installed in his birthplace of Sulmona, Italy.
Harkavy was one of 250 sculptors who exhibited in the 3rd Sculpture International held at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in the summer of 1949.
She married Louis Harkavy, a New York pharmacist who also wrote for Yiddish-language periodicals.
Work Harkavy's works can be found in: USPO in Winchendon, Massachusetts, United States Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, New York, United States Merchandise Mart in Chicago, Illinois Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg, Russia Harkavy's New England Woman, was displayed at the New York World's Fair of 1939
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