The art of Akiva Kenneth Segan

UTW 42 Shoah Dreams

Description, background, exhibits, bibliography, acknowledgements

ART: 1997-2000. The work was begun summer ’97 and completed May 2000.
After it was completed the drawing paper was slightly – albeit visibly damaged -during the February 28, 2001 “Nisqually” earthquake. The drawing was lying image side down on a long table. Bricks from the walls of the artists studio came off the walls during the quake and landed so hard on the back of the drawing that the front (image) side of the drawing had creases all over the paper.
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A 4 min., 34 sec. video narrated by the artist: Holocaust educ w/ art: 2001 quake damaged monumental Holocaust drawing by A.K. Segan

MEDIA: Ink, colored inks, gouache, colored pencil on paper mounted on board
SIZE: The drawing paper is 4 x 8 feet; the framed drawing work is slightly larger. I designed the drawing to be exhibited set on top of a table, allowing viewers can walk around it and see the imagery from all sides.

Acknowledgements follow, below.

BACKGROUND TO THE IMAGERY:

The inspiration for my creating a large multi-image drawing with people and wings seen all around the drawing was a handout flyer made at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, announcing my spring slide class at the Faner Hall Art Museum auditorium, 1996. The flyer included black & white detail reproductions of several wings derived from photos I’d sent of wings series drawings. In the flyer the wings are seen flying around.

FELIX NUSSBAUM: See the man with a yellow Star of David, red wing and hat (viewers left): Felix Nussbaum, a German-Jewish painter from Osnabruck. During WWII In Europe, Felix Nussbaum, who grew up in Osabruck; and his wife Felka, who was Polish Jewish and grew up in Warsaw and also an artist, were in hiding for several years in Brussels, Belgium. They were prisoners 283 and 284 on the last transport train of Jews from Belgium, which left July 31, 1944. They arrived at Auschwitz on Aug. 3. Prior to their arrest, both continued to create art, an amazing accomplishment of fortitude, resilience and hope.

Nussbaum churned out an astonishing array of self-portraits, and also still life paintings and drawings. Hoping against hope to survive, someone reported them. They were sent in the last transport of Jews from Belgium to the Nazi mass murder - extermination - death camp at Auschwitz, where they were gassed.

Nussbaum’s self-portrait was the first imagery I drew in Shoah Dreams. It was inspired by his most famous painting: Self- Portrait with Identity Card. Nussbaum’s battered “red wing” was found by a former girlfriend of mine in a backyard in Fremont, a Seattle district, and given to me as a parting gift on the morning of Yom Kippur, 1996. It was the last time I saw the former girlfriend. It was a sad goodbye and made Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the year in the Jewish calendar, especially trying that day.

re: Nussbaum’s original painting, which is his best known artwork:
Self Portrait with Identity card. Signed, undated: Felix Nussbaum (on the card), after August 1943. Media: Oil on canvas, 56 x 49 cm. [22 x 19 inches].
Provenance: Felix Nussbaum collection, Niedersachsische Sparkassenstiftlng in the Kulturgeschichtiches Museum Osnabruck. The painting is reproduced in the book
Felix Nussbaum - Art Defamed, Art in Exile, Art in Resistance (Eng lang ed published 1990, by Rasch Verlag GmbH & Co., KG, Bramsche, Germany)

CHILD with BIRDS NEST SCARF around neck; blanket over his or her head is drawn with yellow’ish trim (above Nussbaum). From a photo I first saw in the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum website [Photo archives search: Kielce, ghetto, children].

The child (name not known) posed for a Nazi ordered propaganda booklet the Judenrat (the Nazi-directed Jewish Administrative Council) in the Kielce Ghetto, Poland was ordered to make. The smiling child holds a cup and what seems to be a compressed flat “brick” of bread. The scarf was probably made out of twine. The Kielce ghetto was “liquidated” between August 20-24, 1942. Children and sick adults had been removed from the ghetto several days earlier for termination.

ITALIAN JEWISH WEDDING RING: (left). Drawn from a Northern Italian wedding ring, ca. 16th-17th century, seen in the book “Jewish Ceremonial Art,” by Gutmann (’66, T. Yoseloff, publisher.) Note the synagogue on top of the ring.

BUILDINGS drawn in black and white (upper left) are in a street corner in Drohobycz, Ukraine, which was Poland during the war. Bruno Schulz was executed there by a German officer in 1942.

BRUNO SCHULZ (full figure, wearing a suit and tie, black and white, seen upside down at a diagonal at viewers left of the upside-down Tlomackie synagogue interior). Polish-Jewish visual artist and playwright (Street of Crocodiles, Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass) There is a small black and white wing coming out of his left shoulder.

Schulz and the Drohobycz buildings (upper left) were drawn from photos in “Letters & Drawings of Bruno Schulz” (edited by the late Polish historian and biographer of Schulz: Jerzy Ficowski; published by Harper & Row, NY ’88).

TOMAS KULKA. A child with cap (upper left) drawn in black ink dots over gouache underpainting in golden-orange. Tomas Kulka, age 3, drawn from a photo taken in ’37 and published in the 2000 Calendar published by the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, the text states: Olomouc (the city), Czechoslovakia, ’37. “Because he was Jewish he was never allowed to attend school. Two weeks before his 8th birthday, in May ’42, Tomas and his maternal grandmother died at Sobibor. In the same year, his parents Elsa and Robert, died in the Ossova labor camp.” Sobibor was a Nazi death camp in Poland.

LARGE BUILDING INTERIOR (towards upper right) depicts the interior of the Tlomackie (Great) Synagogue of Warsaw, completed in 1878. Located outside the Warsaw Ghetto, the Germans blew up the synagogue and its world famous library in May ’43 to “celebrate” the destruction of the ghetto. Most of the 500,000 to 600, 000 Jews who had been forced into the ghetto in ’40 when the Nazi’s set it up as a sealed concentration camp were murdered.

The abstract section depicting a VASE with FLOWERS flanked by ANTLERS (at viewers left of the domed synagogue roof) was drawn from a Polish –Jewish gravestone found on p. 153 of the book “Time of Stones,” Interpress, Warsaw.)

POLISH TORAH CROWN, 16th - 17th century, neo-Classical with Polish eagles (lower right corner). The Hebrew letter “Chai” seen in the magenta – pink section of the Torah was a fanciful addition by the artist and not seen in the photo of the Torah Crown itself. Chai means “life,” as in the song “To Life, To Life, L’Chaim,” made famous in “Fiddler on the Roof.” Drawn from a photo in the magazine “In The Land We Shared,” published by Interpress, Warsaw in the 1980’s. That issue was given to me by my mother’s late cousin Genia Dayan of Vilna and Tel Aviv.

MAN WEARING A JACKET and TIE (far right - upper torso depicted) was Alin Lederman of Ostrowicz, Poland. Alin’s parents Lejzor and Laja; his three brothers Peter, Lejb, and Josef; and two of his sisters: Hanah and Zosia were murdered, along with the siblings spouses and their own children. Laja, Zosia and Hanah are seen in the work “Laja Lederman and daughers…” elsewhere in this exhibit.

One sister, Gloria, survived. In 1996 Gloria’s daughter gave Segan a 1928 photo of the family taken in Poland. All the murdered family members with the exception of brothers Peter and Lejb have been depicted in Under the Wings drawings.

In addition to all those family members, at the time of the war each of the children was married with children; everyone perished except for Gloria.

PINNACLED TOWER (bottom right) was in the Warsaw Ghetto. I have not yet researched what this building was. The Hebrew letters on the building are fanciful and were not in the photo the drawing was created from.

SIGN in HEBREW and ENGLISH LETTERS (in center, blue and magenta’ish gouache)
TEATR EL DORADO ….RYWKELE DEM and Hebrew letters: Sign was a theatre marquee sign in the W.G. for the El Dorado Theatre; the play was titled ‘The Rebbe’s Little Rebecca.’ Rebbe is a term of respect for Rabbi. Drawn from a W.G. photo probably probably from 1941.

A librarian at the USHMM wrote to me on Nov. 8, 2000, the Nazi overseers of the Warsaw Ghetto approved the El Dorado to be the first theatre in the Warsaw Ghetto “approved for theatrical productions.” It is believed the El Dorado did not exist prior to the ghetto and that no other theater had used the space it used prior to the ghetto. The librarian’s letter included the following information, from the book “Theatrical Performance During the Holocaust:
Texts, Documents, Memoirs,” by Rebecca Rovit and Alvin Goldfarb (pub. by Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1999).

“It was owned by a woman named Judith, who also owned the only other Yiddish language theater in the Warsaw ghetto. She had connections with a German officer and used this connection to make sure no other theater could perform in Yiddish, eliminating possible competition. The theater did not maintain high standards, but it changed plays once a month. It presented “Song of Songs” and “Village of Youth,” which later became a major event in the ghetto.

SMALL BEIGE-COLOR BUILDING (center, foreground) was the Lesko, Poland synagogue. It is now an art museum. Drawn from a photo by Chuck Fishman in “Polish Jews: The Final Chapter” (McGraw-Hill Paperbacks ’77). Fishman studied in the School of Cinema & Photography, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale in the mid-1970’s; Segan attended the undergrad art dept. The late rabbi Earl Vinecour, who directed the campus Hillel House at the time, authored the text of Polish Jews – The Final Chapter.

ELDERLY WOMAN drawn in black ink (towards top center, to the immediate right of the “child with birds nest scarf”) with one wing drawn on her right shoulder (wing seen on viewers left) was Zlata Barshewsky, the artist’s great-grandmother. One of Zlata’s children was Harry Graff, who died in Englewood, New Jersey in 1968; Harry was Segan’s maternal granddad.

Zlata Barshewsky was a resident of the Jewish Home for the Aged in Bialystok, Poland. The residents of the home were deported with thousands of other Bialystok Jews between Feb. 5-12, 1942 and gassed at the Treblinka death camp in Poland.

As Harry was born in 1880, Segan estimates Zlata was probably born sometime around 1860 and was probably in her 80’s when removed from the Home for the Aged, packed into a train cattle car, and sent to her death.

The other child, adult and elderly people depicted are anonymous and nameless victims drawn from Warsaw Ghetto photographs.

PROGRAM INSTALLATIONS, EXHIBITS:

1998 Seattle Central Community College Art Gallery
The drawing, then in-progress, was titled in label copy signage as "Holocaust Scenes.” It was table top displayed, allowing gallery visitors to walk around it and view it from all sides.

1999 University Congregational Church, Seattle
The drawing was displayed for congregants and other attendees following a Holocaust remembrance service that Segan co-led portions of, with D’vorah Kost and Rev. Dr. Donald MacKenzie

2000 University Christian Church, Seattle The drawing was displayed for congregants and other attendees of a Holocaust remembrance service that Segan co-led portions of, with D’vorah Kost and Rev. Jeanne Vandergrift.

2001 Frye Art Museum, Seattle Education wing exhibit of Holocaust themed artworks by four Seattle area artists.

2002 Wing Luke Asian Museum, Seattle
Shoah Dreams and several other wings series drawings were exhibited as a companion exhibit to a photo exhibit about a late Chinese diplomat, Feng Shan Ho, who had saved the lives of thousands of Jewish Austrians who he had provided with visas.

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

2000, April 29. The Seattle Times, "Church tackles anti-Semitism," by religion reporter Sally MacDonald

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2001, October 11. Frye Art Museum, Seattle. Second keynote speaker of the ‘Witness & Legacy - Contemporary Art about the Holocaust exhibition.’ Illustrated lecture by British art historian Dr. Deborah Schultz: "Holocaust Education Through Art for the Twenty First Century."
Youtube posted video footage (1 hour, 8 min).

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2001, November 4. The JT News - Voice of Jewish Washington, Seattle, article on the Frye Art Museum exhibit, authored by Jessica Davis.

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2002, April 4. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, article: Tribute to an unsung hero of the Holocaust, by Judy Wagonfeld. The article mentions Shoah Dreams.

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2002, December 6. The JT News – Voice of Jewish Washington (newspaper published by the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle): Reproduction of Shoah Dreams.

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Spring 2007. The Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester, England. Poster, and a postcard. The card and the poster were for a play about Janusk Korczak. The poster & postcard art is a detail from Shoah Dreams of a boy in the Warsaw ghetto, drawn with a wing.

2013. Ode to David Eisenstadt, music CD, Berlin. Arranged and performed by cantor Mimi Sheffer & The Warsaw Singers. Reproductions of detail images of Shoah Dreams published in the CD booklet

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:

At the Burke Museum of Natural History:
Special thanks to Burke Museum loading dock - reception desk staffer Brom Wikstrom.
At the Burke’s ornithology lab: Thanks to all of the ornithology dept. staff (and some graduate students) for generous assistance with the wings collection in the course of creating Shoah Dreams and many other UTW and SWD artworks. Special thanks to Chris Wood, Sharon Birks, Rob Faucett, Sievert Rohwer, John Klicka and former staffer Pamela Gross.
Special tribute in-memory of ornithology curatorial assistant Carol Spaw (b. Houston, Texas, 1943; d. Seattle, 1997).

Thanks to donations from late Holocaust survivor Chana Lorber, her late daughter Rosalie Revesz, University Congregational Church, Seattle and University Christian Church, Seattle, for assistance with funds for framing “Shoah Dreams.” Thanks, too, to many friends & acquaintances over the years while creating the wings series.

Thanks to former Frye Art Museum education director Stephen Broocks; and to former Fyre curator Debra Bryne. At the Wing Luke Museum of Asian Pacific Art, special thanks to former director Ron Chew, to former staffer Manuel Cawaling, and to other WLAM staff ca. 2002 (too many to list everyone by name).

Thanks to Del, now retired custodial engineer, University Christian Church, Seattle; and to
Stan Willard, of Seattle, for technical assistance in framing Shoah Dreams in the basement of University Christian Church.

At University Congregational Church, Seattle, thanks to Office Manager David Anderson; former Sunday school principal Kris Garrett; former UCC pastors Dr. Donald MacKenzie and Peter Ilgenfritz; and former (interfaith committee chair) Stan Willard. Special thanks to (former Covenant House - Campus Christian Ministry director – pastor, near the Univ of Washington, Seattle campus) Brooke Rolston for organizing transport of Shoah Dreams to the Frye Art Museum, 2001.

Thanks to my late mother Barbara, and her late cousin Genia Dayan (raised Vilna; lived in Tel Aviv after the mid 1950’s) for photos of their grandmother (my great-grandmother) Zlata Barshewksy, who lived in the Jewish Home for the Aged, Bialstyok, Poland, 1930’s and who was murdered by the Nazis.

Additional acknowledgements are within the background-to-imagery notes, above.