Edna Hibel

Edna Hibel (1917-2014) was a commercially successful artist best known for her mother and child paintings. She was married to Tod Plotkin, my great uncle on my father's side. She moved from Brookline, Massachusetts to Florida in 1968. The Hibel Museum of Art, founded in 1977 in Palm Beach and now housed on Florida Atlantic University’s Jupiter campus, has more than 2,000 original paintings, sculptures and porcelain works. She credited her fourth-grade math teacher with launching her career as an artist in a 1974 interview with the Boston Globe. “I guess I was adding and subtracting too quickly. Anyway, I’d have my work done before the others and I probably became fidgety. That’s when my teacher gave me a small box of watercolors to hold my attention.”