refugee artist
Memory, Empathy and Image:
The Art of Luise Schröder (Germany)
and Kitra Cahana (Canada)
1014 - space for ideas
1014 5th Avenue, New York, New York, NY, United States
Discussion with artists Luise Schröder (Germany) and Kitra Cahana (Canada) Moderated by Ori Z Soltes, PHD Teaching Professor at Georgetown University in Washington DC Introduced by Rachel Stern Director and CEO of the Fritz Ascher Society in New York NY This program explores the work of two young artists -- Kitra Cahana, from Canada; and Luise Schroeder, from Germany -- whose photography, documentary filmmaking and other work have been informed by an acute awareness of the myriad complications that have beset diverse individuals and groups within the complexities of the twentieth- and twenty-first-century world. Their inspirational sources range from the Holocaust to the Black Lives Matter movement as, in similar and yet very different ways, they [...]
Through the Prism of Time:
John H. Less (1923-2011)
and His Visual Impressions of
Holocaust Refuge in Shanghai
1014 - space for ideas
1014 5th Avenue, New York, New York, NY, United States
Presentation by Steven Less, PhD Senior research fellow emeritus of the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law and son of the artist in Heidelberg (Germany) and Hannah-Lea Wasserfuhr PhD Candidate at the Center for Jewish Studies in Heidelberg, Heidelberg (Germany) Moderated by Rachel Stern Director and CEO of the Fritz Ascher Society in New York Born in Berlin, John Hans Less (1923 – 2011) fled to Shanghai in September 1940 as a 16-year-old together with his family to escape Nazi persecution. Largely dependent on relief organizations to survive, the Less family soon went through further disruptions when the Japanese occupied the city and later confined Jewish refugees to the Hongkew [...]
Eva Hesse (1936–1970): Returning to the Source?
Featuring Eva’s sister Helen Charash and Ori Z. Soltes, PhD
1014 - space for ideas
1014 5th Avenue, New York, New York, NY, United States
Eva Hesse arrived to the United States as a 3-year-old, was raised in a community largely of Holocaust survivors, and by her Twenties was a rising star on the New York art scene, contributing a unique voice to the shaping of post-Abstract Expressionist art. A key turning point in her innovative art was a return visit to Germany on an artist fellowship. How do we understand the work of this brilliant figure whose life suddenly ended, from brain cancer, at the age of 34? She was born into an observant Jewish family in Hamburg, in a Germany being devoured by the Nazis. She and her older sister Helen were sent to the Netherlands in 1938—when she was not [...]
Rudi Lesser (1902–1988):
The Forgotten and Rediscovered Artist
Featuring Lillie Johnson Edwards, PhD and Ori Z. Soltes, PhD
1014 - space for ideas
1014 5th Avenue, New York, New York, NY, United States
Rudi Lesser, a graphic artist already gaining significant recognition in his twenties in Germany, survived the Holocaust in Scandinavia. Interestingly, he immigrated to the US just after the war, in 1946, and although achieving success in New York--and as the founder of the graphic arts department at Howard University in Washington, DC--never felt at home here. He returned to a different Germany, in 1957, where he lived in relative poverty and obscurity--but apparent contentment--for the remaining thirty years of his long life. Lesser was one of over 10 Jewish refugee professors at Howard University and among the more than 60 at Black colleges, primarily in the South. Like other Jewish and white progressives and liberals of his era, [...]
Remembering Friedel:
An Intimate View of Friedel Dzubas (1915-1994)
Featuring Karen Wilkin and Sandi Slone
1014 - space for ideas
1014 5th Avenue, New York, New York, NY, United States
In a prolific career that spanned nearly five decades, Friedel Dzubas (b. Berlin, 1915–d. 1994, Newton, Mass.) articulated his mature style by the 1970s, creating a striking visual language from counterpoised abstract shapes of brushed color that he juxtaposed, overlapped, and opened to reveal his gessoed grounds. Yet, in prior years, Dzubas’s early work in Berlin were influenced by Expressionist artist of the two primary groups known as Die Brücke and Die Blaue Reiter. As Dzubas told curator Charles Millard in 1982, “Their unheard-of brashness of color; that was really brave. That was very exciting. Color’s an emotional thing. These people not only spoke directly; they felt deeply. There was passion.” His early pen and ink watercolors embed the [...]
From Sea to Shining Sea:
Anni Albers in America (1899–1994)
Featuring Laura Muir and Ori Z. Soltes, PhD
1014 - space for ideas
1014 5th Avenue, New York, New York, NY, United States
Anni Albers (Berlin 1899 – 1994 Orange, CT) found her artistic identity at the renowned Bauhaus--but not where she expected to. The gender-restrictive conditions at the school pushed her to textile work. As the Nazis forced the Bauhaus closure, Anni and her already well-known husband, Joseph Albers, immigrated to the United States, where Joseph and later Anni were invited to teach at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. From there to New York and Yale University, while her husband gained renown as a teacher and practitioner of painting, Anni expanded her presence as an innovator in diverse textile media and styles, shaping a far-flung, influential career that resonates to this day. The United States presented Albers with new [...]
The Cartoon Crusader Comes to America:
Arthur Szyk’s Battle against the Nazis in the New World
Featuring Steven Luckert and Irvin Ungar
1014 - space for ideas
1014 5th Avenue, New York, New York, NY, United States
Prior to World War II, Polish-born Arthur Szyk (Lodz 1894 – 1951 New Canaan, CT) was best known for his ornately detailed renderings of historical subjects and Jewish themes. But after the German invasion of Poland in September 1939, he gained the accolades of international audiences for his biting caricatures of Nazi leaders and his efforts to garner support for the Allied cause and Europe’s persecuted Jews. In 1940, Szyk took his mighty pen to the United States, where he quickly became a popular artistic sensation. His images graced the covers and inside pages of leading magazines, like Time, Colliers, Esquire, Look, The American Mercury, Coronet, and Liberty. Szyk’s cartoons regularly appeared in The New York Post, The Chicago [...]
Lily Renée (1921-2022):
From Refugee to Renown
Featuring Trina Robbins, Adrienne Gruben and David Armstrong
1014 - space for ideas
1014 5th Avenue, New York, New York, NY, United States
Lily Renee arrived during the Holocaust in New York City as a teenager, and somehow found work in the male-dominated comic book world. By the time of her retirement, she had become a legend and her heroic female characters--like Lily herself, smashing through the glass ceiling of gender expectation--and shaping figures that would inspire several generations of young readers, both girls and boys, to rethink the norms that so often otherwise surrounded them. Image above: Lily Renée, Senorita Rio, Fight Comics, Fiction House, not dated. Trina Robbins collection. Lily Renée, Lily Renée, The Werewolf Hunter, Fiction House, not dated (probably 1948). Trina Robbins collection © Lily Renée Lily Renée, The [...]
CONFERENCE: Identity and the Arts
FEATURING Libby Copeland, Ori Z Soltes
Deborah Tannen and Oksana Yakushko
1014 - space for ideas
1014 5th Avenue, New York, New York, NY, United States
What is it that defines human identity? DNA? Language? Culture? Landscape? Polity? Or is it a combination of all of these factors? How do the sources of identity make it easy or difficult for individuals who migrate from one location to another—by choice or under duress—not merely to adapt but to become fully comfortable within their new home? In this brief Zoom Conference, an interdisciplinary panel of experts considers how identity is shaped by our genomic make-up; how it is affected by the migration from home to new and different dwelling places; and how, in particular, migrational shifts can affect artists and their creative process. Expert Panel: Libby Copeland, Award-winning journalist and author Ori Z Soltes, Teaching Professor at Georgetown [...]
Fritz Ascher (1893-1970):
Coming back to Life
Featuring Karen Wilkin and Elizabeth Berkowitz, PhD
1014 - space for ideas
1014 5th Avenue, New York, New York, NY, United States
Fritz Ascher (Berlin 1893 - 1970 Berlin) almost made it out of Germany as the persecution of the Jews was developing. SINCE HE HAD been arrested and released from concentration camp and prison after several months, friends managed to book passage on a ship to Shanghai, but the German Nazi bureaucracy refused to let him leave the country. Ascher found refuge in the basement of his deceased mother's friend, Martha Grassmann--in a house located in the Grunewald, the heart of the Nazi brass residential neighborhood in Berlin. In hiding--an interior migration--he shifted from vibrantly expressionist paintings and drawings to dense poetry. AFTER the war he emerged to a Germany very different from the one he had known before and [...]
