During her German High School she was captivated by all art, but particularly by the German Expressionist painters and their use of color: Macke, Nolde, Kirchner, Beckman. She grew up in a Catholic village where women married young because, village rumor suggested, “they had to.” Her feminist instincts for reproductive autonomy were awakened and inspired her entire adult professional life: working with women who needed abortions when abortions were illegal in the US, in the first legal clinics in New York City, with Planned Parenthood, directing the National Abortion Federation and finally founding and directing two national initiatives, the Ryan Residency Training Program and the Fellowship in Family Planning, to train and inspire the next generations of gynecologists as clinicians, researchers and advocates. (www.veteranfeministsofamerica, StoryCorps, ABOG’s Talking Women’s Health).

She also began more formal art training beginning with pastels, then oil and eventually acrylic and studied art with San Francisco painter Fred Reichman, who guided her in her early fruit pastels and her first couple portrait of Carl Djerrasi and his wife, Diane Middlebrook. While growing her professional career in the US and internationally, she continued to study painting at Oregon’s Sitka Center for Art and Ecology, most notably with Larry Thomas, a Northern California artist and former dean of the San Francisco Art Institute.

Uta’s work is primarily focused on pastel images of fruit, figurative art, and portraits in oil and acrylic. She began her latest series of paintings – Women Crucified – to create a visual narrative of the suffering inflicted on women. (See more on this newest series here)