oha 1985

Elie’s Sin

Art: 1984-87
Size: Paper size, 31 in. H x 26 W
Framed, 47 inches H x 37 W (including height & width of the railway spikes that protrude from the top, bottom and right side of the frame molding). The railway spikes were added around 1992.
Media: Ink, watercolor, charcoal, white ink, with rubbers stamps, postage stamps, and fortune-cookie fortune from Kau-Kau Restaurant, Seattle: "He who suffers remembers." In January 2016 a wooden toy was added on the upper side of the wood frame molding, lower right.

EXHIBITS

1987 Gracie's Restaurant on Broadway, Seattle. The exhibit was Segan’s fundraising exhibit for his then forthcoming International Artist-in-Residency, Aberdeen Art Gallery, Scotland.
1989-90 Fear of Others / La Peur de l'Autre - Art Against Racism / L'art contre le Racisme - In Search of Tolerance / En quete de tolerance, International Exhibition Against Racism, Vancouver, Canada. Trans-Canadian tour, 1991-92 with one American exhibit site, in Sacramento, Calif.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

1989 Fear of Others catalog (see Exhibitions, above)
2000 The Seattle Times, Apr 29. “Church targets anti-Semitism,” by Sally Macdonald. Seattle Times religion reporter.
The hard copy Seattle Times issue included a photo of Segan, UCC senior pastor Dr. Donald MacKenzie, and UCC congregant and interfaith committee chair Stanley Willard looking at the drawing on a table in the ornithology lab, Burke Museum of Natural History, University of Washington, Seattle.

PROVENANCE

1984 – 1999, studio of the artist

1999 – 2008, collection of University Congregational Church, Seattle.
After being stored in a closet for years it was returned to the artist in 2008.
After the 1999 purchase, church staff and boardmembers (with the exception of since-retired Senior pastor Rev. Dr. Donald MacKenzie, who had overseen the 1999 purchase) declined the suggestion by the artist of an all congregational talk and Q&A with the artist, to include clergy, adult congregants, Sunday school attending children, youth, teachers, parents.

Studio of the artist, 2008

Background notes

ELIE’S SIN – BACKGROUND NOTES, originally written 1988-89.

Numbered footnotes and additional notes, April 29, 2002.

ELIE’S SIN is a mixed media artwork on paper 1984-87 by Akiva Kenneth Segan

(formerly Kenneth Akiva Segan)

ANALYSIS of the artwork ELIE’S SIN:

1) The image to the (viewers) right of Wiesel’s head is a SALUTING CONCENTRATION CAMP GUARD TOWER. (I walked up the guard tower which adjoins the train entryway to Birkenau (1) where (the Nazi officer and medical doctor known as “The Angel of Death”) Josef Mengele made his selections (2) giving me an overview of the size and scale of the camp (3).

2) COURT CASE – CONTACT INTERPOL (4) DEPT HEAD refers to the collaboration between Interpol and the Nazis during the years of the Holocaust.

3) 800 INFO ASSIST is a reference to American apathy at the time of the Shoah (concerning the extermination of European Jewry)

Further wordage:

4) DESCRIP(tion) INMATE W(iesel born) 1928

5) use CAUTION - EXTRANJ(ero, Spanish for foreigner)

6) SPE(aks), REA(ds) WRI(tes) FRENCH OTHERS

7) ARM-ed BOOK THIEF (refers to the Nazi theft of Jewish everything, in particular for their infamous Jewish Historical Museum collections)

8) YID aka KIKE with the hat and umbrella in a parody image of a light-bulb lit marquee and someone dancing…my goal was and is to have viewers think about what the pejorative words (Yid, Kike) mean and their common use in society

9 JEW ALERT! may mean an alert for Jews (danger: Nazi’s) by Jews or an alert to Nazis that Jews are around

10) The swastika is done in a manner that I haven’t seen in post-war work about the Holocaust (which isn’t to say it hasn’t been done but that I’m unaware of anything comparable). My intention is to get the viewer to think about the symbol and its meaning.

11) ELIE’S SIN of course refers to the “SIN” of having been born Jewish and, hence, marked for death…RESISTED DEATH of course places Wiesel, and any other of the fraction of Jewish survivors in that group who bear witness

12) The text at bottom: This was, is and will be, G-d willing, a Jest (or test) of the Viewer’s Visual Broadcast System, as given in the G-D given creative abilities I have been blessed with. I wish to thank my parents, my brother, my companion and privy counselor of the last two years, H.J.D. of Tacoma and Seattle, and lastly, to pay homage to my grandparents, Lillian and Jacob S., and Sarah and Harry G., who came to America from Kiev, Vilnius, Bialystok, and Odessa*.

And I must raise another ? for which I thank Mr. Wiesel:: Are we, Jews and non-Jews alike, all survivors of the Holocaust? Proscribed before myself, I am, Kenneth Akiva Segan

Religious witness Rabbi James Mirel

Framed witness Edwin R. Wirkala

Storeroom witness Heidi J. Drucker (all witnessed in January 1987)

[*Note appendix, May 26, 2016: My grandparents were from Vilna, Lithunia; Bobroisk, now in Belorussia; and Bialystok, northeast Poland. I don’t recall where, or when or I had thought, back in 1984 -85, that one of my grandparents was from Odessa]

I added the following note around 1992:

“The railroad spikes in the frame were added in 1991, the symbolism of course concerning the trains which crisscrossed war-ravaged Europe (and an increasingly beaten German army) taking Jews to their deaths till the end of the war.”

Footnotes and additional notes - April 29, 2002, referring to the Background notes, above

(a) The larger of the two sites that made up the Auschwitz-Birkenau death and concentration camp complex. According to the ‘Encyclopedia of the Third Reich’ by Louis Snyder (McGraw Hill, 1976) “it is estimated from one to four million persons died in gas ovens and in a variety of other methods at Auschwitz.”

(b) Selections at Auschwitz-Birkenau were to the “Right!” (slave labor) or “Left!” (to be murdered in the gas chambers)

(c) It was huge, the size of a whole city. I saw the remains of barracks – chimneys near and far-off in the distance in front of me.

(d) The International Criminal Police Organization is the organization used by police departments worldwide requesting assistance across national borders.

(e) Referring to (Elie) Wiesel. To the best of my knowledge Wiesel speaks and understands Yiddish, Hebrew, French, English, and. perhaps languages also. Wiesel was born in Sighet, Romania, Sept. 30, 1928. He and his family were deported to concentration and death camps. The story of his father’s death by his side formed an integral part of his first book “Night,” in the 1950’s. World-renowned as the leading spokesperson on the Shoah and the author of numerous fiction and non-fiction books, he won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986.

(f) I was probably referring to the immense collections – warehouses full of objects (ritual religious objects, pianos, Torahs, etc) stolen from Czech Jews by the Nazi’s, catalogued and collected to house their planned “research” and propaganda institute and museum about Jewry in Prague, a sort of post-war anthropology museum. Most of the Jews involved in the cataloguing were murdered. The 1983 Smithsonian Institution book “The Precious Legacy – Judaic Treasures from the Czechoslovak State Collections,” edited by David Altshuler, chronicles this history in text and with photos.

(g) disparaging or derogatory

(h) Three-fourths of European Jews were murdered. Had the war in Europe lasted another six months, millions more would have been murdered.

(i) Wiesel and other survivors speak of “Bearing Witness” to the genocide

THE DRAWING – HOW IT BEGAN:

The portrait of Wiesel was the first thing drawn in the work. Media: Pencil, colored pencil, charcoal and white ink.

This was done between the summers of 1984 and 1985 between my first and second trips to Poland. The photo used as inspiration for the portrait was by William Coupon and appeared on the cover of the New York Times Sunday Magazine, October 23, 1983.

The cover story was titled “BEARING WITNESS: THE LIFE AND WORK OF ELIE WIESEL”by Samuel G. Freedman.

The artwork was shelved for at least a year afterwards as I was in Europe and the U.K. from June to December 1985.

In 1986, back in Seattle, I drew the rest of the imagery: the checkerboard pattern (at viewer’s right of Wiesel’s head); the partial and complete words; the color swastika; the guard tower, etc.

THE RUBBER STAMPS AND POSTAGE STAMPS: The rubber stamps and postage stamps were probably added last, but before the Witnesses signed their names. The order of the rubber stamps below the guard tower read left to right FRAMED - SIN - OFFICIALLY NOTED.

The rubber stamps used to make SIN and ANULOWANO were stamped from a rubber stamp set of individual letters. The Star of David rubber stamp was from my own rubber stamp collection.

The “EXPIRED,” “DOES NOT CIRCULATE,” RELIGIOUS,” SIGNATURE,” “CANCELLED,” “EXAMPLES,” “Framed,” “HISTORICAL,” ‘DISCARD,” “Use no thumb tacks gummed tape or mark in any way,” “DO NOT FOLD” and “OFFICIALLY NOTED” rubber stamps were used courtesy of the old Art & Music Dept. at Seattle Public Library, where I worked as a part-time clerk, 1982-85.

THE FORTUNE COOKIE:

The fortune cookie fortune at lower right states “He who suffers remembers.” It came in a fortune cookie I got (twice) at Kau-Kau Restaurant on King Street in Seattle’s International District. The fortune seemed particularly Jewish to me at the time. It still does. ~

The postage stamps are French.