IAM
Confronting the Holocaust in Midcentury American Art. Presentation by Jennifer McComas, Bloomington (Indiana)
ONLINE VA, United StatesThe Holocaust’s profound impact on midcentury American art has been underrecognized and understudied. Jennifer McComas, curator of the current exhibition Remembrance and Renewal: American Artists and the Holocaust, 1940-1970 at Indiana University’s Eskenazi Museum of Art and primary author of the accompanying catalogue, explores the ways that American artists—American-born, immigrants, refugees from Nazi-occupied Europe, and Holocaust survivors—confronted the Holocaust in their work during the war and in the decades just after. Image above: Anna Walinska (American, born England, 1906-1997), Survivors – Exodus, 1958. Oil on canvas, 60 x 84 in. (152.4 x 213.4 cm). Gift of Rosina Rubin, Eskenazi Museum of Art, Indiana University, 2023.29. © Atelier Anna Walinska. Photo: Shanti Knight. REGISTER HERE If you are [...]
From Vienna to Movies:
Costume Designer Ruth Morley at 100, a birthday commemoration.
Presentation by Melissa Hacker and Susan Gammie
ONLINE
VA, United States
In this virtual event, the life and work of Costume Designer Ruth Morley will be discussed by her daughter Melissa Hacker and Susan Gammie, her assistant, protégé and close friend. Ruth Morley (1925-1991) fled her childhood home in Vienna on a Kindertransport as an unaccompanied child refugee, arrived in New York City as a teenager, and became a noted costume designer whose career spanned decades and disciplines, including dance, opera, theater, film and television. Her film credits include American classics Tootsie, Annie Hall, Taxi Driver, The Chosen, Kramer vs Kramer and The Hustler; her theater, opera and dance credits include Death of Salesman (with Dustin Hoffman), The Threepenny Opera, Deathtrap, Miracle Worker (stage and film, for the film, she received an Oscar nomination), Billy Budd, the Golem, and many more. Television includes Playing for Time with Vanessa Redgrave and Mussolini with George C [...]
Flight or Fight? Artists in Nazi Germany, 1933-1945
Presentation by Rachel Stern, New York
ONLINE
VA, United States
Between 1933 and 1945, the National Socialist regime controlled artistic work in Germany. Join Rachel Stern, founding director of the Fritz Ascher Society for Persecuted, Ostracized and Banned Art, for a discussion about the system of fear and control installed by the Nazis, its impact on the national cultural landscape, and artists’ strategies of survival. This event is part of the 2025-26 KHC and National Endowment for the Humanities Colloquium, “Resistance, Resilience and Reinvention: Artists and Academics Escaping Nazism.” It is co-sponsored by the Holocaust & Human Rights Education Center in White Plains; the Center for Genocide and Human Rights Research in Africa and the Diaspora at Northeastern Illinois University; the Center for the Study of Genocide and Human [...]
