UTW 36

Young man with Star of David armband in the Warsaw ghetto  

Art: 2001
Media:  Mosaic-drawing combo. The drawing is plexiglass protected
Size: 84 inches H x 38.5 W [75.6 x 56.5 cm]

Media, the drawing: India ink, gouache, & colored pencil on paper, mounted on foam-core board.
Media, the mosaic: Broken glass & ceramic tile. Included are rocks, shells and ceramic tiles found on beaches during my travels, among them from Bar, Yugoslavia and Barcelona.

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The "compressed rock" made out of hundreds of tiny seashells I picked up on the Atlantic Ocean beach near the city of W. Palm Beach, Florida.
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The flint (rock) was from the garden of friends who live in Stoke-by-Clare, a village in Suffolk, England.
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The plexiglass used for the art was a gift from a late Holocaust survivor, American-immigrant and long-time Seattle resident Chana Lorber, and her daughter, also of blessed memory, Rosalie Revesz.
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Photo plates from the "Wooden Synagogues" book inspired some of the drawn images depicted in the young man's torso between his shirt collar and arms folded across his his chest.   An example is the depiction of five flying birds seen in a synagogue wall-painting; an elephant, geese, violins, a city wall, possibly the Western Wall. 
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A photo in the book “The Last Jews of Eastern Europe” (photos by Brian Blue, text by Yale Strom) was used as source inspiration material for the “orthotic” seen towards the bottom of the drawing. The shoe insert had been cut out of a Torah scroll by a Nazi officer; the photo taken by photographer Brian Blue in a town in Hungary while he and Yale Strom were researching material for the book.
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Exhibits

• 2001 Frye Art Museum, Seattle

• 2003 Temple Beth Shalom, Spokane, Washington

  2013 Hillel Center, Univ. of Washington, Seattle

  
  

  Two videos posted by the artist on Youtube

  Young man with Star, during exhibit tour, Hillel Center, Univ. of Washington, Seattle, 2013
   (4M,17s)
  5 monumental Holocaust mosaic artworks (4M,18s)