JT News – Voice of Jewish Washington, Seattle
Nov. 24, 2001
“Witness & Legacy” spotlights four local artists at Frye Museum 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.
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 [maternal grand] 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.
(“Witness and Legacy” runs through Jan. 13 at the Frye Art Museum.