Artist Statement
Artist Bio
Carolyn Manosevitz was born and raised in Winnipeg, Canada. She received a BA cum laude from the University of Minnesota and MFA from the University of Texas. Manosevitz has been involved in the arts for over 20 years as a visual artist/educator and creativity consultant. She has taught at the University of Texas, Southwest Texas State University, Austin Community College St. Edward's University. She has been a faculty member in the Art Department at Colorado Mountain College for the past 15 years and is a Visiting Lecturer at the Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary where she has taught : SPIRITUALITY AND THE HOLOCAUST since 1996. She has also been a visiting professor at Wake Forest University Divinity School in Winston-Salem, NC, The Iliff School of Theology in Denver, CO and Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, DC.
Manosevitz has exhibited widely both in the U.S. and Canada. Her work is part of private and corporate collections in the U.S., Canada and Israel. As an active member of the College Arts Association, she has chaired sessions at national conferences and served on a national committee to select a distinguished teacher of art. In Austin, she was a member of the Interdisciplinary Peer Panel Review Board and State Resources Panel appointed by the Austin Arts Commission.
The focus of Manosevitz's art is the `aftermath' of the Shoah, including her numerous conversations with children of Holocaust Survivors. This body of work has brought recognition in the form of project grants from the Colorado Council on the Arts, the Texas Commission on the Arts and the City of Austin. Paintings from this series are now part of permanent collections at the Ghetto Fighters' Museum and Yad Vashem in Israel. With a grant from the Texas Commission on the Arts, she produced a documentary film based on her conversations with the Second Generation. An additional focus of Manosevitz's work, inspired by her Christian seminary students, deals with the Judaeo/Christian dialogue: reconciliation and healing. As a result of this work, in 1999, she chaired the steering committee for a major symposium in Austin: THE ARTS, SPIRITUALITY AND THE HOLOCAUST. She was also steering committee chair for a symposium that took place in Aspen, Colorado in 2002: AFTER THE SHOAH: The Unanswered Questions. An exhibit of her work opened this event.
Installations of Manosevitz's work have taken place in Colorado, Ohio, California, Wisconsin, Arkansas, Minnesota, New York.
Most recently her one person exhibit HEALING: A Personal Journey opened the conference: DEPARTURES: New Feminist Perspectives on the Holocaust at the University of Minnesota.
Artist's Statement
For several years, my art has been inspired by what I call the aftermath of the Shoah*. This odyssey that I find myself on, has taught me much about the effect on our world of the most heinous crime in human history. Additionally, I have learned much about myself and my own need for healing after the Shoah. I believe we ALL need to heal.
I have watched myself on this journey and observed how each step has changed both my art and me as well. My paintings are about healing. The intention is to provide an arena for my viewer to find his/her own pain and thus begin to heal. Before the healing process can begin, one must first identify the pain. A field of abstract imagery permits the viewer to tap into his/her own creativity and identify emotional responses. In any healing process, the wound must be protected. Hence I began to layer papers that surrounded and would ‘protect’ a central image.
The phenomenon of memory is also a recurring theme in my art. At present it is tied to a recent trip to the Ukraine where I stood at the mass grave where my father’s family is buried. The eternal presence of absence is a concept that I continue to explore., I believe it is one’s previous experiential memory that contributes to the construction of a story about an event at which one was not present.
As a child of Jewish immigrants to Canada from the Ukraine, it never occurred to me that someday I would turn to the process of seeking reconciliation between Christians and Jews through dialogue and artistic imagery. Nevertheless, reconciliation with my Christian brothers and sisters is a recurring theme in my current work. This has come about as a result of my appointment as visiting lecturer at a Christian seminary. Since 1996, I have been a visiting faculty member at the Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary in Austin, Texas. There I have found an arena of compassionate and understanding brethren with whom I can dialogue about faith-----theirs and mine, after the Shoah. This process has contributed significantly to our mutual healing. Teaching at several other Christian seminaries has fueled both my art and my soul.
The course that I teach: Spirituality and the Holocaust ( now at several Christian seminaries) is a reminder of the fact that the Shoah* wreaked havoc with people of all faiths. We all need to heal. It was a universal event that changed the course of history and it must never be forgotten. That is my passion: to remember and to heal----others, as well as myself---- with my art as the vehicle.
carolyn h. manosevitz mfa
December, 2007.
*Hebrew meaning catastrophe----the term used by modern scholars to describe Hitler’s Final Solution.