Sid Kamerman

Sid was born in New York City in September, 1943 and lived there until 1955, when his family moved to Stanton, a sleepy town in the heart of the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia. Sid graduated from high school in Stanton in 1961 and, after 2 1/2 years of engineering school, received a BA in English from the University of Virginia in 1966. For the next two years he was a Peace Corps volunteer in Yamoussoukro, in the Ivory Coast, in West Africa. There he taught auto mechanics in the French language in a small rural technical school. In the summer of 1968, he worked for the Peace Corps, training new volunteers in Anières, Switzerland. Sid met Jeannie at the orientation for new public high school teachers in Buffalo, New York and eloped in March, 1969. They taught in Buffalo city high schools for two years and then moved to Bloomington, Indiana. At Indiana University Sid began to work toward a graduate degree in Modern English and American Literature. To keep body and soul together Sid opened a soon to be thriving Volvo and Mercedes Benz repair garage in Bloomington, Indiana. After moving to Pensacola in 1979, Sid worked as a technician at the local Volvo and Mercedes Benz dealership. He began taking sculpture classes from Michael Boles at the then Pensacola Junior College now Pensacola State College. What began as a lark, quickly progressed to an earnest pursuit. Unable to keep up the pace of working a day job and making art in the evenings until midnight, Sid quit his day job in August, 1995, to devote himself to sculpture full-time. The highlights of Sid's artistic career include winning the first Cinco Banderas purchase award in 1987, best of show at the 2011 Great Gulfcoast Arts Festival, a large outdoor sculpture at Northwest Florida State College and a large indoor sculpture in the atrium of the College of Public Health in the University of Arkansas in Little Rock. Sid has many sculptures in public and private collections nationwide. Sid is survived by his wife of 46 years, Jeannie Kamerman. The Sid Kamerman Memorial Gathering will be held at Artel Gallery, date and time to be determined.

Tributes

Sid Kamerman

September 15, 1943 - March 30, 2015