March 14, 1942 – July 8, 2023
Julie Lewitzky, 81, artist renowned for her popular portrayals of local homes
“It all started because I did someone’s house as a thank you, and he showed it to our local Realtor,” Julie Lewitzky told The Buffalo News in 1995. “She hired me to do one every time she sold a house.”
Her pen-and-ink line drawings of homes locally and elsewhere became the foundation for a flood of images that made her one of the area’s most visible artists in the 1970s and 1980s.
In a feature article about Ms. Lewitzky in 1984, News reporter Karen Brady observed: “There probably are few Buffalonians who have not seen Julie’s work – on cards, posters, T-shirts, tote bags, postcards and more.”
Her designs graced the pages of the Parkside Community Association’s calendars for more than 40 years. She created a poster for the Buffalo Science Museum featuring an oversized snake. Another for the Buffalo Zoo included a giant grinning gorilla presiding over the grounds. Her poster for what was then the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in 1981 offered a panorama of the museum’s history “perfect for creative coloring.”
Her color murals covered walls in Buffalo Early Childhood Center Schools 31, 74 and 78, as well as the Buffalo Academy of Visual and Performing Arts.
“I’d been trained as a fine artist and taught that commercial work was less interesting, more technical,” she explained to Karen Brady. “But I felt that there were different ways of being an artist.”
She died July 8 in her home in the Parkside neighborhood after a period of declining health. She was 81.
Born in Buffalo, Julie Kulberg was the daughter of Siegfried Kulberg, the Austrian-born president of a local ironworks, and Lenore Loeser Kulberg, a librarian in the Buffalo and Erie County Public Library system. She grew up in Snyder, attending Park School and Amherst Junior and Senior High Schools, graduating in 1960.
She began studying at Syracuse University, then earned a bachelor’s degree in art history with a minor in painting at the University at Buffalo. She went on to take post-graduate courses in art, attended the Columbia University Graduate School of Social Work for a year and worked for a couple years at the former Ingleside Home.
One of her first exhibits was a display of watercolors and sketches in the Clarence Public Library. By 1972, her work was in the Members Gallery at the Albright-Knox.
All of her house portraits were produced from photographs. In 1984, she estimated that she had done more than 1,000 of them. She also created a line of Buffalo cards and put a whimsical design on boxes of macaroons called Buffalo Chips.
In recent years, her work was seen in the children’s Useum at the Burchfield Penney Art Center. Her last exhibit was in Betty’s Restaurant in Allentown in 2018.
She also was active in Jewish Family Services, coordinating volunteers for the resettlement of emigres from Russia in the early 1990s and then coordinating volunteers for all the agency’s programs.
By 2001, she had become volunteer coordinator for the Albright-Knox Art Gallery. In 2003, she oversaw the efforts of nearly 200 volunteers to accommodate the crowds that attended “Masterworks from the Phillips Collection,” the museum’s largest special exhibition up to that time.
She was married in 1965 to David Lewitzky, an Erie County mental health counselor and a published poet. Survivors also include a daughter, Beth Lewitzky; twin sons, Joel and Steven; and three granddaughters. Her brother, Andy Kulberg, a music producer and bassist with the influential 1960s rock band, the Blues Project, died in 2002.
A celebration of her life was private.