The Palm Beach Post
West Palm Beach, Florida | Section D, p. 1D | Tuesday, December 20, 1994
ACCENT PALM BEACH COUNTY LIVING
Angels' wings lift artist's grim work
[upper] color photo by Mark Mirko, Staff photographer, caption:
Artist Kenneth Akiva Segan gives angels' wings to his subjects. Many of the images are taken from photographs of Warsaw ghetto inhabitants, who later died in Nazi death camps. [Mirko's photo was a profile of Segan standing next to a drawing he was working on during his current visit to W. Palm Beach. The drawing is of a prayer wall in a synagogue in Tykocin, Poland]
Were there Jewish angels amid the horrors of the Warsaw ghetto?
Artist Kenneth Akiva Segan thinks so. Segan's drawings are based on photographs of ghetto inhabitants, most of whom died in the suffocating squalor or in Nazi death camps. He gives them angels wings.
"I want to give the people dignity," he said. "Each of these people once had a name, once had parents. But in life and death, they've come down to us as anonymous and nameless. I make them angels."
Segan's latest work is called Under the Wings of G-d: Drawings and Reflections on the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in Poland, 1939-43."
A Seattle resident, the 44-year-old artist's parents live in West Palm Beach and he is a frequent visitor. Although his work isn't currently on view here, he's trying to arrange a February lecture at the Kaplan Jewish Community Center in West Palm Beach.
The center is hosting an exhibition devoted to Anne Frank, and Segan thinks his work fits perfectly into the Holocaust theme.
Segan's drawings were recently exhibited in Seattle in conjunction with an exhibition devoted to the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial. Next summer, he will be represented in a group exhibition at the B'nai B'rith Klutznick National Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C.
Segan is a frequent lecturer on the Holocaust and art, and is setting up a non-profit education foundation on the subject.
"It's sad how many people remain ignorant of the Holocaust," he said.
"When I talk to kids about the Holocaust, they look at me as though I were talking about something as old as the Civil War."
He says art is a useful tool in teaching about the
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Please see Segan/4D
[photo at right, page 4D, caption:
Old Man Praying is part of Kenneth Akiva Segan's collection.
Holocaust victims take flight in Segan's work
SEGAN
from 1D
Holocaust. "Art is universal. It reaches many different audiences" in many different ways.
Segan grew up in New York City as a not especially observant Jew. He studied at New York's Art Students League. He became more engaged by his Jewish identity while studying at Southern Illinois University, where he earned a B.A. in art. He has a Masters in printmaking and drawing from the University of Missouri.
In 1984 and 1985, Segan wandered throughout Poland. His grandparents were Polish and Russian immigrants. His visits led him to paint old Jewish synagogues and cemeteries. Since so many of Poland's Jews were slaughtered in the Holocaust, many Jewish buildings have been abandoned or converted to other uses, Segan said.
Segan said there are plenty of sources to draw on for his ghetto series. Some of the more intriguing were photographs taken by a German soldier named Heinz Jost, who got permission to visit the ghetto for a single day in 1941. Jost's photographs were made public by his widow decades after the event. The photos made up a traveling exhibition sponsored by the Smithsonian Institution.
Many ghetto residents also made art detailing daily life before the deadly Warsaw uprising in 1943, Segan said.
"One of our great sources of information on the Nazis' Final Solution' was the number of artists who sketched, drew and painted in the sealed-in ghettos, the transportation trains and the death camps," Segan said. "Most of these artists perished, but we are fortunate to have these tragic but priceless records.
Segan's drawings often show the more prosaic aspects of ghetto life, but they aren't any less horrific for that - a scholar squints at the Talmud, his face a mask of almost pained concentration; a boy lifts the head of a man who died in the street. Two girls seated side by side - one appears to be blind, a fact that adds to a sense of vulnerability and impending doom.
All the figures have wings. Segan draws the wings from actual birds wings in the collection of the Burke Museum at the University of Washington.
"Many people of different faiths and backgrounds have found solace in the winged figures," Segan said. " But some people have questioned why a Jewish artist would represent murdered Jews in what is commonly thought of as 'Christian' image - angels.'
Segan said "Jewish angels" can be found in Jewish belief, tradition and history.
The Old Testament is rich with angels, and they also appear frequently in Jewish folk tales, Segan said. "In folklore, some of the angels are saintly, some are malicious, and others are malicious. And they can take variant forms, human and not-so-human," he said.
Segan's ghetto angels are heartbreakingly human. "I often try to imagine how these Jews would want to be represented. With their bodies torn by bullets?
No, I think of them as angels. Metaphorically - and poetically - I am trying to give them the flight they were denied in real life.