Absence/Presence Artists
Barsamian is an Armenian-American artist who resides in Dallas, Texas. He received his B.F.A. from the Massachusetts College of Art, Boston, and an M.A. from State University of New York at Albany. He is a teacher and lecturer whose works have appeared in several exhibits. His works dealing with Armenian Genocide were influenced by personally surviving a violent armed robbery, after which he began to relate to the experiences that his grandmother and mother endured in Armenia.
Born in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia in 1929, Brand survived the Holocaust in several the camps including Auschwitz. She immigrated to the United States in 1966 and attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, and Boston University School for the Arts. Her porcelain sculptures have also appeared in the After Auschwitz exhibit, which toured Europe in 1995.
Chafetz is a World War II veteran and a Professor Emeritus of Art at Ohio State University. He received his professional training at the Rhode Island School of Design, L'Ecole Des Beaux Arts, Fountainbleau, the Academe Julian, Paris, and studied with artists Fernand Leger and Stanley W. Hayter. He has been regularly represented in major print exhibitions since 1947. "Perpetrators" has been shown throughout the United States and in Europe since 1992. One set is in the permanent collection of the Florida Holocaust Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida, and is available for loan.
Galles was born in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, former USSR and is a child of Holocaust survivors. He has lived in Poland, Israel,Italy, New Jersey and is currently Chairman of the Art Department at Soka University in Aliso Viejo, Califonbria. . He received his B.F.A. at Tyler School of Fine Arts of Temple University and his M.F.A. at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He taught as Professor of Art at Fairleigh Dickinson University, New Jersey for more than 28 years.
Gould is a New York-based conceptual artist whose work centers around history and memory and often deals with issues related to the Holocaust and World War II, especially the integration of Anti-Semitism into everyday life in pre-war Europe. She was educated at the Rhode Island School of Design and has exhibited widely in Europe and the United States. She is represented in the collections of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Heap of Birds was born in 1954 in Wichita, Kansas and is a resident of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Reservation in Oklahoma. He received his B.F.A. from the University of Kansas and his M.F.A. from Tyler School of Art, Temple University. He has also done additional graduate studies in painting at the Royal College of Art in London. His installation, "Building Minnesota" was commissioned by The Walker Art Center. He is now Professor of Art at the University of Oklahoma, Norman, and has been visiting Professor of Art at Yale University. His work has been shown around the world, including at the Whitney Museum in New York. In 2004, his work appeared in an exhibition at the Florida Holocaust Museum entitled "Reservations." For more information, see: HEAPOFBIRDS.COM
Vesna Krezich Kittelson was born in Bosnia and Hercegovina and grew up in the ancient city of Split in Croatia. She has lived in Paris, Vienna, and Cambridge, England and is currently on the staff of the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. She has been involved in a number of individual and group exhibitions, including Birth of Freedom at Macalester College Galleries, Sculptured Painting in Cambridge, England, and the International Library Project at the Weisman Museum in Minneapolis.
Born in 1915 in Vienna, Koerner studied at the Academy of Applied Art. He immigrated to the United States in 1939. His parents and his brother were murdered during the Holocaust. Like Ben Shahn, Koerner worked for the Office of War Intelligence, where he created several award-winning war posters. He was responsible for drawing sixty-five covers for Time magazine.
Kramer is an artist from New Jersey who decided to conceptualize the Holocaust by counting six million grains of rice. His untitled video is a documentation of his attempt. In 1994 after ten months of counting, he reached one million grains. The video is a part of the touring art exhibition Witness and Legacy: Contemporary Art about the Holocaust, which will continue to tour the country through the year 2000. His video was first exhibited in the New York Jewish Museum exhibit, Too Jewish?
Libera is a controversial Polish pop artist who spent a year in prison under Communist rule for sketching unauthorized political cartoons. His name has become known internationally for his pop-art works which are called Correcting Devices and are designed to bring children's naive imaginations closer to the adult reality. Examples of these "devices" are Ken's Aunt, an elderly version of a Barbie doll, and the Lego Concentration Camp, featured in this exhibition. Libera withdrew from the Venice Biennale in 1997 because his artwork (Lego Concentration Camp) was so provocative as to reignite issues about the memory of the Holocaust in Poland and anti-Semitism today.
Born in Haifa, Israel, Liberman immigrated to the United States after she completed high school. She has earned four American University degrees in social studies and law, including a J.D. from the University of Chicago Law School and an LL.M from the University of Michigan Law School. She studied art at the Boston Museum School, at Massachusetts College of Art, Decordova Museum School and at the Art Institute of Boston. She has completed all course work for the Degree of M.F.A. from the Boston University School of Arts. She is an award winning author and illustrator as well as a teacher.
Born in London immediately after the war to a "lapsed Irish Catholic, communist father" and a German-Jewish mother who was a member of the "kindertransport" from Germany to England in 1939, Loftus received her DipAL in Fine Arts from Brighton College of Art and her MA in "Narrative and Sequential Illustration" from Brighton University. Her work has appeared in one-woman exhibitions in Brighton and London, and multi-artist exhibits in Edinburgh, Birmingham, Bristol, Amsterdam and Leeds. He work is held in private collections in the U.K., France, The Netherlands, The United States and Japan. She is currently working on a sequel to The Confiscation of Porcelain called Landscape with Wanderwogel, which focuses on her mother's youth as a persecuted Jew in Nazi Germany.
The daughter of a Holocaust survivor, Lyon was born in New York City and attended Barnard College and Pratt Institute. She received her M.F.A. from the University of Minnesota, where she is now an associate professor. Selections from her work, Conversations with Rzeszow included in the Witness and Legacy exhibition, originated by the Minnesota Museum of American Art and presently on national tour.
Born January 18, 1973 in Elyria Ohio, Newman received his B.A. at Baldwin-Wallace College and his M.F.A. in Media Arts from Ohio State University. He has made three films, two of which deal with the Holocaust, titled Synagogues on Fire (1996) and Agnus Dei (1998).
Howard Oransky was born in Los Angeles in 1955. His B.A. and M.F.A., both in painting, are from California State University and California Institute of the Arts, respectively. In The New York Times, Phyllis Braff wrote of his work: "...the vacant stares of witnesses to horror help these figures to function also as timeless symbols of profound suffering." Karl Moehl, in The New Art Examiner, wrote: "The artist's rendering here is crisp and clear, his control of modulations in gray exceptional." He has received fellowship grants in painting from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, and the Jerome Foundation Travel and Study Program. Oransky is currently exploring the fragile and ephemeral aspects of memory in a new body of mixed media work, which references the Holocaust. He is employed at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.
Born in Kovno, Lithuania, Shahn immigrated to Brooklyn, New York in 1906. He first worked as a lithographer's apprentice until 1930 and was formally educated at NYU and the National Academy of Design in New York City. One of America's most renowned artists, he is well known for the posters he designed for the Office of War Information during World War II and his murals for the W.P.A. in the thirties. His most famous painting is The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti (1931-32).
Roy Strassberg is Professor of Art and Chair of the Art Department at University of North Carolina at Charlotte, after having served in the same position for many years at Minnesota State University, Mankato.
He received a B.A. in Art from the State University of New York at Oswego and a Master of Fine Arts degree in ceramic art from the University of Michigan. He was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1950 and attended public schools in Queens and Long Island. He has exhibited extensively at the national level and has work in several prominent public collections. Holocaust Bone Structures were shown as a room installation at the Minneapolis Institute of the Arts during Spring, 1998.
Born in Bialystock, Poland and now residing in New York City, Toporowicz's work Obsession has been quite controversial. In addition to its exhibition in galleries, in March and May 1994, he took his work to the streets by posting over 200 of his posters based on the Calvin Klein® perfume ads all over the city. He has had many exhibits and is also a performance artist.
Arnold Trachtman resides in Cambridge, MA. He received his M.F.A. from the School of the Arts, Institute of Chicago, and since 1982 has been Professor at the Massachusetts College of Art. His paintings have an impact because of their high color and political messages. His work is held in many public collections, including the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University, The Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and the Museum of Afro-American Artists.
Waldman completed her studies in Berlin on a Fulbright grant and twenty-five drawings from her Falling Man series are in the permanent collection of the Berlin Museum (Judische Abeteilung). Other works on the Holocaust are in the Memorial Terezin Ghetto Museum in the Czech Republic. In addition to work on the Holocaust, she has done works that deal with African apartheid. She has collaborated with African liberation movements, producing eight books of life histories, from documentation of colonial abuses in Kenya to township life in South Africa. She continues to lecture and publish on art and social issues and has taught drawing classes at the University of Washington.
Born in 1954 and a member of the Lakota-Cheyenne River reservation, Yellow is an artist and poet. He received his B.S. at Black Hills State University, South Dakota, and did advanced graduate work in Fine Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has been a visiting artist at the University of Minnesota and has received many awards for his work. His paintings are held in the permanent collection of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and many private collections. In 2004, his work appeared in an exhibition at the Florida Holocaust Museum entitled "Reservations."