Musical Jewelry Box by Edna Hibel Brown wood with Print 7 x 4 x 2 inches

Edna Hibel was born in 1917 in Boston, Massachusetts. Her parents were Abraham and Lena Hibel, and she was raised in the Boston area and educated at Brookline High School where she met her future husband, Theodore Plotkin.

Hibel studied at the Boston Museum School of Fine Arts, from 1935-39, receiving a Sturtevant Traveling Fellowship to Mexico.When Hibel was just 23, the Boston Museum of fine Arts acquired one of her paintings for their collection making her, at the time, the youngest artist to be purchased by a major American museum.  In Boston, in 1966, she began lithography, continuing in 1970 in Zurich, where she still works every year. She has created lithographic works with up to 32 stones (or colors) on paper, silk, wood veneer and porcelain. The latter pieces are called lithographs on porcelain and result from a complicated process, that she keeps a secret, whereby she transfers stone lithographic color separations onto Bavarian hard paste porcelain. Hibel has created the "Arte Ovale" series and various plaques with this technique.

She organized the Edna Hibel Museum of Art, in Jupiter, Florida, to display and promote her work and also created a United Nations stamp, "Mother Earth."

Edna Hibel (1917-2014), a painter of sentimental pictures of children, has had a more than 60-year career as painter and lithographer and promoter of peace through exhibitions of her artwork. Hibel's work has been exhibited in museums and galleries in more than 20 countries including Russia, Brazil, China, Costa Rica, and the United States, and under the royal patronage of Count and Countess Bernadotte of Germany, Count Thor Bonde of Sweden, Prince and the late Princess Rainier of Monaco and Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II of England. Pope John Paul II gave her a medal of honor as did the late Belgian King Baudouin. She also received honorary Doctoral degrees including from Eureka College, and Northwood University of Florida, Michigan and Texas. She also has received many humanitarian honors for her charitable efforts for children's and medical charities. 

She graduated from the School of Museum of Fine Arts in Boston in 1939 and went on a fellowship to Mexico, which was one of many trips that had inspired her paintings. She was known for her Impressionistic style, her lithographs and her “Mother and Children” series. 

A street in Abacoa is named after Hibel, and Edna Hibel Appreciation Day was proclaimed by the Palm Beach County Commission on Nov. 16, 2004. 

She had a private sitting with the Queen of England, she was the first women allowed to tour behind "The Great Wall" of China. She was dubbed the "Hippie Grandma " by Lucy Baines Johnson