By Jessica Davis, JTNews Correspondent
“In light of recent national events and as the youngest Holocaust survivors generation approaches, the desire to share information and perspectives has elevated,” said the Frye Art Museum’s Art Director Richard V. West about the “Witness & Legacy” exhibit currently on display at the museum.
Artwork is being used as a starting point for promoting Holocaust awareness in the traveling exhibit. “Witness & Legacy” explores the history and memory of the Holocaust and examines its contemporary meaning through a collection of works created by Holocaust survivors, their children and empathizers.
In combination with “Witness & Legacy,” the Frye is displaying the work of four Seattle-based artists and educators, who in addition to their artwork, give lectures, teach classes and write books about the Holocaust. These featured artists include Gizel Berman, Maria Frank Abrams, Selma Waldman and Akiva Segan. Their work will be on display in the education wing of the gallery through Jan. 13.
Gizel Berman’s sculptural works can be found in many locations throughout the Northwest including the Stroum Jewish Community Center and the Mercer Island Public Library. Her recent book, My Three Lives — A Story of Love, War and Survival, chronicles her life before, during and after the Holocaust. It can be downloaded at www.mythreelives.com.
One of Berman’s proudest moments was when she was chosen to sculpt the Holocaust Memorial for the Greater Seattle Jewish Community Center on Mercer Island. The 13-foot-high bronze sculpture, which took her nearly a year to design, represents the six Hebrew letters in the Biblical command, “Lo Tiskach” or “Thou Shalt Not Forget.” The Hebrew letter “Lamed” was extended to look like a chimney. On the round base, in bronze relief, are the names of the camps and the Warsaw Ghetto, in which an estimated 6 million Jews and others were killed. And on the bronze tablets on a curving wall behind are the names of Seattle-area residents’ family members killed in the Holocaust. “A survivor would not create something tortured,” said Berman. It was a very conscious choice for her to use the letters, said Berman’s daughter Margaret. “It came from mother’s heart and her loss,” she said. A smaller version of the sculpture is included in the Witness & Legacy exhibit.
In 1948, artist Maria Frank Abrams and her cousin escaped the Holocaust on college scholarships given by the Hillel Foundation. Both of them attended the University of Washington in Seattle. They were selected for the scholarships out of only 47 people in the world.
Abrams earned a bachelor of fine arts and master’s degree from the University of Washington. She has designed sets and costumes for the opera “The Dybbuk” and sets for Seattle Opera’s “La Traviata.” In 1992, she presented a solo exhibition at the Vizual Art Galeria in Budapest, Hungary. Abrams, a painter for more than 50 years, said she doesn’t usually create art about the Holocaust.
Her newest works to be displayed at the museum are very different than her usual work, she said. Most of her work is more abstract, with sunsets and other outdoor scenes. She said that it is difficult to convey the tragedy and suffering of all the survivors and what their lives were like. “It’s very, very difficult to do Holocaust paintings,” said Abrams. “It’s almost impossible.”
One of the new pieces, she dedicated to the memory of her aunt. It is a mixed collage with photos and paintings of her aunt. The other piece includes even more photographs with a transcribed postcard in the background written in Hungarian. The postcard was written in the winter of 1944 on a family vacation. Her aunt was sent to a concentration camp about five or six months later and died four months after that. “This really silly postcard has been a revelation,” said Abrams. “All of a sudden there is this woman there that I didn’t really know.” “I was thinking about this because once I’m gone, there won’t be a sign they were here,” said Abrams. “This is my project for my family.”
Abrams said she was thinking of the project back in 1975, but it really got its start about nine years ago. When she started the project, her art was very dark and starkly tragic. But it came to her that she wanted to show the lives of these people who had wonderful lives, not tragic. She wanted to show their lives the way they were before they were taken away. “We lived very fine lives,” said Abrams. “I’m glad it took so long to work on this project.” In her upcoming projects, she said she wants to portray other members of her family who perished in the Holocaust. Some of her other work concerning the Holocaust is on display in Israel at Yad Vashem.
Unlike Berman and Abrams, Selma Waldman is not a survivor of the Holocaust. She began her “Falling Man” series after viewing the Berlin preview of Erwin Leiser’s documentary, now known as “Mein Kampf,” in 1960.
“That was a very authentic and shattering encounter for me,” she said. During the series and until 1972, she also worked on other series and sub-series made up of hundreds of drawings based on Elie Wiesel’s “Night,” in which the author describes how starving people fought each other for scraps of bread thrown into the boxcars on the way to the camps. Some of her work based on “Night” is displayed at the Frye.
Waldman said she wouldn’t feel right, not being a survivor, if she portrayed certain individuals who were murdered. She felt it would be disrespectful to the dead and the survivors as well as the artists who directly experienced the concentration camps. She attempted to capture the effects, not of specific bodies, but of “archetypes of the unspeakable that would suspend the moments of “˜falling’ and transformation into “˜icons of genocide’ — both particular and universal.”
Waldman said she would like to show her work to others, to educate them about the Holocaust. She feels that it isn’t right to use that kind of work to push a career. “Every generation is going to have something different to say,” she said. Waldman said that her greatest honor is having her work exhibited in the city of Terezin, Czechoslovakia. Those who died in this small town numbered 35,000-50,000 during the Holocaust, said Waldman.
Waldman will discuss the work of Terezin artists who perished in the Holocaust in her lecture, “Beyond Bread: Art and the Survival of Memory at Terezin” at the Frye on Jan. 6 at 2 p.m. Waldman’s works may be found in museums worldwide, including the Jewish Museum, Berlin; the Mayibuye Center, Cape Town, South Africa; and the Memorial Terezin Ghetto Museum, Czech Republic.
Akiva Segan began work on his “Under the Wings of G-d” series, which features images taken from photographs of individuals murdered in the Holocaust, about 10 years ago. Segan’s great-grandmother appears in “Shoah Dreams” at the Frye. The works are mainly ink drawings, largely black-and-white, of a head, a torso or sometimes a full-size figure that also include wings, referenced in great detail from the wing collection at the University of Washington’s Burke Museum.
Segan said that he created all of the work in this series for children and young adults. For many, the Holocaust is too hard to deal with and it causes emotional pain, said Segan. “My series is unusually accessible imagery.” He said this is somewhat due to the fact that his work educates without exposing people to harsh and graphic imagery. Wings are a method to make the images of the people accessible to everyone, said Segan.
He said he wants the viewer to think about what the wings mean to them, from their own background. “One of the points of the series is to get people to think about the individuals I’m portraying. They each had a mother, a father, a history.” Segan began the series after being strongly affected by a book of photographs taken in the Warsaw Ghetto. As he learned that some members of his father’s family were among the 6 million Jews killed in the Holocaust, his art took on a new dimension. “In some ways I feel like I’ve barely begun,” said Segan. An artist whose drawings and etchings are in collections worldwide, Segan has been a working artist in Seattle since 1980. He has lectured in the United States, England and Israel. For more information about Segan’s work, visit www.holocaust-art.org.
(“Witness and Legacy” runs through Jan. 13 at the Frye Art Museum, located at 704 Terry St., Seattle. Call 206-622-9250 or visit www.fryemuseum.org. Admission is free.)