BIO

Background and professional statement, artist and tolerance educator Akiva K. Segan

BACKGROUND, UPBRINGING

American Jewish artist Akiva K. Segan was born in New York City, 1950. My grandparents were immigrants to America from eastern Europe (Vilna, Lithuania; Bialystok, Poland; Bobroisk, Belorussia). My parents were American born, New York City. My father was raised in the city; my mother in Englewood, New Jersey. I attended city schools, graduating Martin Van Buren High School, Queens Village, 1968.


Not immune to the social upheaval of the late 1960’s, about two weeks before graduating high school I left home, and hitchhiked across the country. I addressed a bit of that time of upheaval as an eighteen-year-old in a guest column, “My Drug Lessons,” published in The Christian Science Monitor, 2001. I am an alum of Haight-Ashbury, summer ’68. In August 1969, I arrived at Woodstock on the second day and stayed through Jimi Hendrix’s closing songs.

MID-WEST COLLEGE STUDIES, ILLINOIS, MISSOURI, Dec. 1972 – Aug. 1980

I began college studies in December 1972, Parkland Junior College, Champaign, Illinois. “I drew everywhere, both indoors and outdoors, and became proficient in rapidograph (technical pen) ink drawing; I also made linocut (linoleum block) prints. During my first semester at Parkland I created my first social justice artwork, a linocut print inspired by a Vietnam war photo I saw in a newspaper or magazine.”

While at Parkland I was a contributing editor to the Parkland College Prospectus (student newspaper); and was elected to the student council. 

In Sept 1974 I began my sophomore year as a transfer student at the School of Art, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale (B.A., Art; Printmaking major, drawing minor, ’77). I began etching in 1975. (continued etching until 1985).

In Carbondale, I made my first Judaic-themed artwork, titled “Rabbi Hillel – Thou Shalt Love Thy Neighbor as Thyself” (1974). This is the text of an art history paper I wrote for a class assignment, March 1977, winter-spring semester: 19thC Art History paper, spring '77 M.F.A., University of Missouri, Columbia, 1980.
 


POST-COLLEGE

After grad school, I moved to Seattle, Washington, late August 1980. Like most artists worldwide, I worked a part-time job to support the arts career. Now I am a retired public library clerk.



POLAND, 1984

I spent six weeks in Poland, summer 1984, as a participant in the summer study programs for foreigners. I was in the small art group, titled “Landscape as a Source of Artistic Inspiration.” Sponsored by the Kosciuszko Foundation, NY, the summer in Poland led to a dramatic change in the thematic directions of my subsequent artmaking.

In addition to two major landscape drawings, I drew in the southern Polish village of Rytro (“Hayfields, Rytro, 1984,” “Rytro Metamorphosis”); I made my first artistic responses to the Holocaust in fall 1984 in Seattle: “Elie’s Sin,” and “Homage to Pawiak Prison, Warsaw, 1984.” 
[see Other Holocaust art, 1980’s]. 
 



BACK TO POLAND, TRAVELS in BRITAIN, EUROPE, 1985

In July 1985, I returned to Poland to attend the Polish-Jewish Relations summer course, Jagiellonian University (Univ. of Krakow). Prior to Poland, I spent 3 weeks in England and Scotland; after Poland traveled to Budapest; Bar (Montenegro, then part of Yugoslavia); Corfu island, northwest Greece; and Vienna. While in Corfu, I began a major drawing: “The Jewish Cemetery, Corfu, 1984.”

ABERDEEN, SCOTLAND, 1987

April 2 to August 30, I lived in Aberdeen, northeast Scotland, while International Artist-in-Residence, Aberdeen Art Gallery.

UNDER THE WINGS


In November- December 1991, I drew the first drawing of what became the Under the Wings art series. The series was called Under the Wings of G-d until 2013 when I shortened the name to Under the Wings. The first fifteen drawings in the series were inspired by photos in the book “The 45th Anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising” (Interpress, Warsaw, 1988). 
With the first drawing, I drew wings on the trolley at the ornithology lab, Burke Museum of Natural History, Univ. of Washington, Seattle. When I began the second drawing, early 1992, a series was begun.

 The artworks depict individual Jewish, Christian, a Romany child, and disabled victims of Nazism and Fascism during the years of the Third Reich, Fascism. The victims portrayed were from a number of countries, including (so far), France, Germany-Austria, Romania, Czechoslovakia, the Netherlands, Poland, Lithuania, Italy, Croatia. 

Many of the depictions are drawn with great detail, inspired by photos of real people who lived and who were murdered. 

Many, but not all, of the the portraits and figures are drawn with metaphoric birds’ wings, providing a visual format accessible to people of all ages and ethnic, national, religious and racial backgrounds, especially children and youth. The "wings" series, as it's commonly called, is a catalyst for discussion and learning by teachers and students in our conflict-ridden and troubled world of today.

ISRAEL BERNBAUM, and GUEST TEACHING

Inspired by Israel Bernbaum’s having guest presented slide classes of his art in schools, in spring 1994 I assembled a class showing examples of Bernbaum’s paintings interwoven with drawings from the wings series. The presentation was with an interfaith audience at Covenant House – Campus Christian Ministry, a Christian student organization near the University of Washington Seattle campus. The now retired C-H director, Rev. Brooke Rolston, and I had met at the nearby Hillel Jewish student center, May 1992. We stayed in contact, and the invitation to guest present at Covenant House was my very first presentation of wings series artworks.

Bernbaum was raised in Warsaw’s Jewish district. He had fled east into the Soviet Union around the time of the Nazi invasion of Poland, and survived the war, serving in the Red Army, stationed in Siberia.  He took up painting in middle age when he finally went to college, in Queens, NY, majoring in art. His book “My Brother’s Keeper – The Holocaust through the Eyes of an Artist” (Putnam, NY, 1985) was also published in German and won the German Young Peoples Literature Award, 1990. 


My new slide class interwove art from My Brother’s Keeper and drawings from the Under the Wings of G-d series, as it was then called. Bernbaum, who lived in Queens, N.Y., and Segan exchanged letters in 1992; they spoke on the phone once.

In spring 1992 he told (now deceased) Minneapolis-based Holocaust and genocides art scholar, and academic, Stephen Feinstein about Bernbaums. Shortly after Feinstein flew to NYC and spent a day photographing Bernbaum’s art in his apartment in Queens. Bernbaum’s art was also published in “A Mission in Art: Recent Holocaust Works in America,” by Vivian Alpert Thompson (Mercer Univ. Press, Macon, Georgia, 1988).
 


SINCE 1994 I HAVE GUEST PRESENTED CLASSES, LECTURES, and DRAWING-for-HEALING WORKSHOPS AT

• schools (state/public and parochial; US, UK)

• colleges/universities (U.S, U.K., Israel)

• prisons (Washington state)

• worksites (U.S., UK)

• libraries (King County, Washington)

• art museums (U.S., UK)

• synagogues, churches (U.S., UK)

• Rotary Club (UK)

• International Conferences on the Holocaust & Education, Yad Vashem.



ISRAEL

I made my first teaching trip to Israel in 1999, where I attended and facilitated a workshop at the Second International Conference on the Holocaust and Education, International School for Holocaust Education, Yad Vashem, Jerusalem. Since then I have attended and facilitated workshops at two other YV conferences (2002, 2006);  guest taught at Haifa University (2007, 2010, 2011); and led a teaching training workshop at the Alexander Muss High School, Hod Ha’sharon (2005).

SIGHT-SEEING WITH DIGNITY, human rights art series

In 2003, I began a companion educational art series depicting victims of post-WWII victims of hate crimes, war, genocide, assassinations of journalists, government repression, anti-immigrant hate attacks, victims of American gun terrorism.

One drawing in the series has a subject predating World War II: A young African-American man, Rubin Stacy, who was murdered - lynched in Ft Lauderdale, Florida, 1937. And with the exception of a portrait of Bobby Kennedy, slain 1968, all of the other drawings in the series portray people murdered between 1977-78 and the present.

DRAWING for HEALING workshop, 2003

That year I facilitated by first art therapy oriented workshop with a class of German language/literature students at Pacific Lutheran University, Tacoma, Washington. 
Since then I’ve facilitated the Drawing for Healing workshop (in tandem with power-point classes or following exhibit tours) with classes in schools, universities, houses of worship, etc., in the US, UK and Israel. 
The hands-on Drawing for Healing workshop is art therapy focused and is not a studio art class. It is offered as a way to help process the sadness of learning about difficult and challenging topics such as genocide. The workshop provides a creative format for students and teachers within a safe setting; discussion is directed by the artist and assisted by the teachers. It was inspired by a workshop I attended at the Second International Conference on the Holocaust & Education, International School for Holocaust Education, Yad Vashem , Jerusalem, 1999. That workshop was titled Performance poetry in Holocaust education, led - facilitated by Leah Thorn of England.

COLLECTIONS

My drawings, original prints (etchings, woodcuts, linocuts) are in art gallery/museum, corporate, institutional, library, university and Holocaust museum collections in Austria, Canada, England, France, Hungary, Israel, Scotland and the U.S., and in numerous private collections.  

EXHIBITS

My first exhibit was of a tempera painting, “Mother and Child,” made in fourth grade and exhibited at Lever House, Manhattan, New York, around 1958. I began exhibiting as an adult in 1975 and have since had works shown in exhibits around Canada, the U.S., UK.
  


BIBLIOGRAPHY

Articles, published reproductions of my art: the earliest articles of my art were published in 1974-75.
 Since then articles and reviews of my art; and reproductions of my art have been published in newspapers, journals, magazines, music CD’s and books and reported on in radio and television stations in the US, UK.

Op-eds

My first op-ed was published in 1973 in Prospectus, the Parkland Junior College student newspaper, Champaign, Ilinois. Please visit the BIB section in About the Artist to see the text of many of my published op-eds, which address a variety of topics.

Letters-to-the-editor

I had many letters-to-the-editor published over the years.