Kay B. Seriff

1929 - 2023

Kay B. Seriff
05/03/1929 - 08/23/2023
Esther Kay Berman Seriff died at home on August 23, 2023, surrounded by her family, following a brief illness. Ninety-four years earlier, she was born at home in Sweetwater, Texas. It was around suppertime, and she was delivered by the family doctor, Amos Fortner. As the story goes, he reassured her apologetic mother that he would not miss his own supper. Following the easy delivery, as he placed her fourth child in her mother's arms, he reportedly exclaimed, "See, Mrs. Berman, I didn't even have to call Mrs. Fortner to say I'd be late for supper."

Esther Kay's Eastern European immigrant parents, Abraham Isaac (AI) and Fanny Berman, settled in West Texas in the 1920s, making a living as owners of a dry-goods store until the Great Depression, later reconstituted as a second-hand store for all manner of "antiques" and old, discarded treasures, great and small. They reared their family of four children, Rose, Adele, Gerson, and Esther Kay, in this small community, one of only a handful of Jewish families. Esther Kay learned to read before she entered school and began to draw at a similarly very early age. Her 4th grade teacher, Grace Vincent Favor, an artist herself, offered to provide Esther Kay with private art lessons, at 50 cents a week. Mr. Berman asked her if his daughter's talent was worth the money they would spend on lessons. "Yes!" was the reply.

Esther Kay excelled academically as well, active in the journalism, drama and debate programs at Newman High School, graduating as her class's valedictorian. She was the third Berman child to accomplish that. Rose, who happened to graduate in the same class as the son of the school superintendent, who was named valedictorian, was the only Berman offspring not to achieve that honor. Rose was remembered to have often remarked, "I was the only one of us not to be valedictorian, and 'I'm no dummy!'"

Esther Kay left behind the sneezy tumbleweed of West Texas to attend the University of Texas at Austin, where she earned a BFA, benefitting from the mentorship of many of the most accomplished painters and sculptors in Texas, including Charles Umlauf, Kelly Fearing, Everett Spruce and Loren Mosely. At UT, she was a member of Alpha Lambda Delta (an honorary sorority), the Orange Jackets (an honorary service organization), and was recording secretary, and later president, for her sorority, Delta Phi Epsilon.

With a Depression-era practicality, Kay paired a teaching certificate with her BFA and began a career as an art educator at Pershing Junior High in Houston. Throughout her life, she continued to inspire the talents of children and adolescents, through her teaching at the Houston Museum of Fine Arts. In addition to teaching children, she also prepared art teachers for their careers through her courses in the Art Education Department at the University of Houston. This even included a ground-breaking 30-part television series on KUHT, Channel 8 on teaching art, which was broadcast to teachers throughout Texas.

Kay met her husband, Aaron Jay Seriff, originally from San Antonio, a newly minted PhD in Geophysics employed by Shell Oil, in 1951, when he delivered a challah to the apartment Kay shared with several sorority sisters from UT, one of whom was the sister-in-law of Aaron's older brother. The challah was a gift from that young woman's mother in Austin. Kay entertained this young, handsome eligible bachelor for an hour, felt confident that he would call her the next day, which he did. They married after a 3-month courtship. Their first daughter, Jan Alison, was born two years later, followed two years after that by daughter Suzanne Katherine.

After their daughters left for college, Kay and Aaron rented a 4-room wood-framed house just off the square in Fayetteville, Texas, a house not so different from the one in which she had grown up. There they spent many weekends for many years, although never in the summer, as there was no air-conditioning. Aaron outfitted an art studio for Kay in the front room, where she painted prolifically. Many years later, daughter Suzy and her husband Robert bought that house, renovated it and restored its most impressive 19th century features, but with the essential luxury of air-conditioning. Kay loved visiting them, reconnecting with her old haunts and friends, and she decided to make the Fayetteville town cemetery her final resting place.

Kay continued to paint and draw throughout her life and was in several juried shows in Houston. She took up travel photography as an art form later in life when she began to travel the world. Her eye and a Nikon camera captured the most unexpected images of artisans, street scenes, landscapes and people in Mexico, India, Turkey, Morocco, Uzbekistan, Peru, Guatemala, Cambodia, Vietnam, and Italy, to name a few.

Kay cherished her close friendships with lifelong neighbors who called themselves the Jason Street Curb Birds, a 17-year running play reading group, those with whom she traveled, Houston artists, and a small circle of extremely close "BFF" women friends. She will be remembered by all who loved her for her love of life, her inimitable sense of style, her barn-storming story-telling, her razor-sharp intelligence, her iron-clad memory, her quick-thinking wit, and her bountiful collection of folk-art objects from both her worldly travels and local thrift shops. Her home was a museum in itself, rivaling in number and hilarity, the treasures in her daddy's Sweetwater second-hand store.

Kay was preceded in death by her parents; sisters Adele and Rose; brother Gerson; nephew Lee, and husband, Aaron. She is survived by her daughters, Jan (Mel) Berger and Suzanne (Robert Cullick) Seriff; grandchildren Matthew (Tamara), Aaron, Kate, and Emma; and beloved nieces, nephews and dear friends.

In remembrance of Kay, contributions may be made to the Fayetteville, Texas Arts and Community Center (https://www.fayettevillecommunitycenter.org.