Rachel Stern2022-09-07T15:52:51-04:00March 28th, 2022|Events, Lectures, Past Events|
Maurice Blik has lived in England since being liberated from Bergen Belsen concentration camp, where he was taken as a small child from his birthplace, Amsterdam. The ability to come to terms with this experience and to confront the face of humanity that he has witnessed, stayed silent in his life for some 40 years. It finally found a voice in the passionate sculptures which began to emerge in the late 1970s when he created a series of horses’ heads. These noble and benevolent creatures posses an energy and a life force that seem just barely harnessed long enough to take their shape in the clay itself. Later he progressed to more figurative work in which the irrepressible joy [...]
Rachel Stern2022-03-28T05:26:02-04:00March 28th, 2022|Newsletter|
Dear Friends, When the artist Ben-Zion was born in 1897, his hometown Starokostiantyniv belonged to the Russian Empire. By the time he left for the United States, it belonged to the Ukraine/Poland. Today it again belongs to the Ukraine, and is brutally attacked and destroyed by the Russian army. As the casualties are mounting, we hope for peace, democracy and independence in the Ukraine. Join us on Wednesday, April 6 for a ZOOM LECTURE in our monthly series "Flight or Fight. stories of artists under repression” about the painter, printmaker, sculptor, educator, and poet: Wednesday, April 6, 12:00pm “Ben-Zion (1897-1987): Man of Many Faces” Featuring Tabita Shalem and Ori Z Soltes ) ZOOM EVENT REGISTRATION Ben-Zion, Prophet [...]
Rachel Stern2022-03-28T04:56:27-04:00March 1st, 2022|Newsletter|
Dear Friends, Join us TOMORROW for a ZOOM LECTURE in our monthly series "Flight or Fight. stories of artists under repression" about a recently re-discovered artist: Wednesday, March 2, 12:00pm EST: Jussuf Prince of Thebes – Re-constructing the life and work of a forgotten talent from Safed Featuring Dorothea Schöne, Berlin (Germany) ZOOM EVENT REGISTRATION Jussuf Abbo, Head of a Black Man, ca. 1939, plaster, painted, H: 28 cm. Estate of Jussuf Abbo, Brighton/UK, photo: Gunter Lepkowski Born in Safed, in the province of Beirut of the Ottoman Empire, the sculptor Joseph M. Abbo (1888–1953) – who later renamed himself Jussuf Abbo – came to Berlin in 1911 and began studying at the Royal Academy of [...]
Rachel Stern2022-03-25T18:43:40-04:00February 15th, 2022|Newsletter|
Dear Friends, Our new online exhibition is ready to be launched, and we want to celebrate with you, together with our new partner, the Sheen Center! Please join us: Sunday, February 27, 3:00-4:30pm “Identity and Migration: Artists and Composers who Fled Persecution” The Sheen Center for Thought & Culture, New York MORE INFO AND TICKET LINK During the first half of the 20th century, with the rise of Nazism and other fascist movements across most of Europe, the numbers of people migrating were second only to today. Many refugees made the United States their destination. During this event, expert panelists discuss the degree of receptivity of America to incoming refugees, as well as [...]
Rachel Stern2022-06-07T11:49:44-04:00February 13th, 2022|Events, Lectures, Past Events|
Charlotte Salomon (1917-1943), was a hugely talented Berlin-born artist who was murdered at Auschwitz, four months pregnant, at the age of twenty-six. Her main body of work, a sequence of nearly 800 gouache images entitled Leben? oder Theater? (Life? or Theatre?), and created while seeking refuge in the South of France, is an ambitious fictive autobiography which deploys both images and text, and a wide range of musical, literary and cinematic references. The narrative, informed by Salomon's experiences as a cultured, and assimilated German Jewish woman, depicts a life lived in the shadow of Nazi persecution and a family history of suicide, but also reveals moments of intense happiness and hope. Challenging the artistic conventions of Salomon’s time, it remains [...]
Rachel Stern2022-03-25T17:53:06-04:00January 25th, 2022|Newsletter|
Dear Friends, For this Holocaust Remembrance Day, we invite you to participate in building the largest digital memorial to the victims of National Socialism. In partnership with the Arolsen Archives and Yad Vashem, our event kicks off a 48 hour data entry challenge, during which we ask the global community to get together to enter data from 20,000 documents of the Central Location Index, an umbrella organization based in New York that coordinated the search for missing relatives. This collection, which is now in Yad Vashem, has never been indexed before. Wednesday, January 26, 12:00pm EST: International Holocaust Remembrance Day #EVERYNAMECOUNTS Challenge in Partnership with Arolsen Archives and Yad Vashem FIND OUT MORE AND [...]
Rachel Stern2022-04-06T15:57:51-04:00January 21st, 2022|Events, Lectures, Past Events|
Born in the Russian Empire, Ben-Zion (Benzion Weinman, 1897-1987) immigrated to New York City between the wars, arriving as a craftsman of words whose cultural Zionist convictions led him to write his poetry in Hebrew. By the early 1930s, the rise of fascism and its particularized manipulations of language drove him to despair of the power of words and to turn to visual art as a medium of expression. Endlessly creative, across the next six decades he produced a flood of drawings and oil paintings and sculptures often made by re-visioning found objects of wood, stone, and iron. As a founding member of the expressionist group, "The Ten"--that included among others a young Mark Rothko--Ben-Zion addressed social, political, and cultural [...]
Rachel Stern2022-02-18T06:38:48-05:00January 20th, 2022|Events, Lectures, Past Events|
Become part of an international community that actively helps build the largest digital memorial to the victims of National Socialism. During this 48 hour challenge, we help the Arolsen Archives index documents from the Central Location Index (CLI) at Yad Vashem, which have never been indexed before. Every number, every place, and every name you type in on the crowdsourcing platform will help preserve the memory of the persecutees – and make sure we never forget what happened to them. This event features Elizabeth Berkowitz, our former Digital Interpretation Manager, who speaks about #everynamecounts at the Fritz Ascher Society, and Katharina Menschick from the Arolsen Archives, who introduces the Arolsen Archives and the current project. A [...]
Rachel Stern2022-05-02T14:41:57-04:00January 12th, 2022|Events, Past Events|
Note: Attendees must provide proof of vaccination (including booster, if eligible) and advance Eventbrite registration. Presented by BFA Visual & Critical Studies, the SVA Honors Program, and The Fritz Ascher Society for Persecuted, Ostracized, and Banned Art. In honor of The Fritz Ascher Society for Persecuted, Ostracized and Banned Art's virtual exhibition “Identity, Art and Migration,” this panel discussion probes historical and all-too contemporary fault lines of persecution, migration, intolerance, cultural complexity and art. Historians, curators and artists come together to discuss the life and work of artists who were persecuted by the German Nazi regime and came to the US during the first half of the 20th century, while also hearing from living artists who are facing the challenge of relocation [...]
Rachel Stern2022-03-28T19:23:45-04:00January 5th, 2022|Events, Past Events|
Opening remarks by Consul Yasemin Pamuk, Consulate General of the Federal Republic of Germany in New York Distinguished Panelists Ori Z Soltes PhD, Georgetown University in Washington DC Artist Refugees from Nazi Germany in the United States Rebecca Erbelding PhD, Historian and Author in Washington DC US Immigration Policy during the 1930s Refugee Crisis Stephen M Rasche JD, Catholic University in Erbil, Kurdistan Region, Iraq Identity in a Time of Forced Displacement: Religious Art and the Iraqi Christian Experience David Stern, German born American Artist in New York NY Immigration and Culture Shock in Times of Globalization Musical Performance (Piano) Carolyn Enger, Steinway Recording Artist: Arnold Schoenberg - Sechs kleine Klavierstücke Op. 19 Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou: Homesickness Pt. 1 Paul [...]
Rachel Stern2022-03-02T19:19:46-05:00December 31st, 2021|Events, Lectures, Past Events|
In the late nineteenth century, the sculptor Joseph M. Abbo (1888–1953) – who later renamed himself Jussuf Abbo – was born in Safed, in the province of Beirut of the Ottoman Empire. As a young man, he began working as a labourer on the restoration site being led by an architect, Hoffmann, on behalf of the German government. Abbo was noticed and was rapidly promoted to the drawing-office and to stone-carving. He was offered a scholarship at the Berlin School of Art. Jussuf Abbo arrived in Germany in 1911 and began studying at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Berlin in 1913. By 1919 he had a master studio in the Prussian Academy of Fine Arts. Throughout the [...]
Rachel Stern2022-03-25T18:23:56-04:00December 25th, 2021|Newsletter|
Dear Friends, Until December 31, you can still watch the 2019 feature documentary "Lily" - for free! A big thank you to director Adrienne Gruben for making the film available to us. LINK TO FILM SCREENING AND RECORDING OF 11/17 EVENT There, you can also watch the recording of the November 17 discussion about discovering Lily Renée and producing the film, featuring Award-winning Herstorian and writer Trina Robbins, director and producer Adrienne Gruben and producer David Armstrong. December 31 is also the end of the year. For us, it was the busiest year in the (short) history of the Fritz Ascher Society. We continued our virtual programming with our monthly "Flight or Fight" lectures and our investigation into "Trauma, Memory and Art," and we [...]
