OHA 1976

Six gestural - expressive responses to the Shoah (Holocaust), 1976

The 1976 sketches/drawings were drawn on drawing tablet page, probably 24 x 18 inches. 

I drew these one afternoon in the rental house where I lived at the time. I was a junior, art major, at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. My housemate at the time was Israel, a Cinema & Photo dept major, Yoram Joshua. See The Eternal Jew, the title of his SIU-C Senior thesis film, about my making a wood sculpture, 1977.

I don’t recall a specific book I had read that inspired the drawings. Two years prior, when I was living in Champaign, Illinois, I had read Michael Elkins book Forged in Fury (pub. by Ballantine Books, 1971)

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The Hillel rabbi at SIU and Carbondale, Earl Vinecour, of blessed memory, wrote the text of the book Polish Jews  - The Final Chapter, first published in hardcover by McGraw Hill, 1977. The photographer for that book was another C&P dept major, Charles Fishman, who I knew as an acquaintance from Hillel activities.

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Decades later, in Seattle, I cut the drawings apart. One was collaged onto the drawing paper of the 2012 artwork Primo Levi with small, agitated ARRRRGH! fish. It is as upper right, look for the image with the blue background with white conte tic-tac-toe lines drawn to the left and right [see OHA 2000s]
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In 2014, the other five were collaged onto the wood backboard of the artwork titled
Death in the ghetto + page of Frydrych Zelman Judenrat-issued ID labor card [see OHA – 2000s]