OHA 1984

Homage to Pawiak prison, Warsaw, 1984

The artwork was dismantled in 2010.

The 5 vertical drawing portraits were saved from the 2010 dismantled work and framed with a photo of the original whole artwork placed at bottom of the frame below the portraits.


Framed size: 37 ¼ inch H x 13 5/ 8 W

Blurb on the original art by the artist, written March 26, 2012:

"I began this artwork on a hillside in the village of Rytro, Poland, Tatra mountains, summer 1984. 
The artwork was completed in Seattle in autumn '84 but eventually had gone into disrepair. In 2010, with some sections of the wood frame broken (on which the 2 drawings were mounted, and had been covered with colored thread & metallic twine that fall, '84) it was dismantled. At the time I dismantled the work I took several short films offering a "goodbye - au revoir - do widzenia" to Homage to Pawiak Prison, Warsaw.

~

This was one of two major artworks inspired by my first trip to Poland that summer, 1984. 
The other was Elie's Sin [see Other Holocaust Art (OHA catalog initials) 1984]. That latter work portrays late Holocaust survivor, writer and Nobel Peace prize winner Elie Wiesel along with symbols - visual and linguistic, of anti-Semitism, Nazi hate and the Shoah, and the visual artworks is meant to address how viewers think about and perceive those symbols.

~

I also drew two good sized landscapes while in Rytro: Rytro hayfields, 1984; and 
Rytro metamorphosis. [see Other Holocaust art – 1984].

~

re: Pawiak Prison: Its century + history was sad, violent and murderous, as it was used to house numerous political prisoners for decades, many of whom were executed. These included Jewish and Catholic Poles.  During final years it was a Nazi transit center: About 37,000 civilians were murdered in the prison by the Nazis and another 60 thousand were deported to Nazi death camps from the prison.

~

I visited the Pawiak memorial in the summer of '84 with the foreign art student group; the summer art course program participants were Americans, a Canadian and two Britons, and was organized by the Kosciuszko Foundation, N.Y., in collaboration with the Academy of Fine Arts, Krakow.

~

The deathcamps.org website has an info page on Pawiak prison.

Bib: Homage to Pawiak Prison was mentioned in an article published in 
The Jewish Transcript, Seattle, Vol. LXI, No. 5, March 7, 1981: “A Jewish printmaker at Work,” by Susan Auerbach