VISUAL ARTS + MUSEUMS

Holocaust Museum Houston presents the exhibition Fragile Fragments: Expressions of Memory, on view Nov. 5, 2010 through June 5, 2011, in the Holocaust Museum Mincberg Gallery.  Featuring works by Thea Weiss, Roz Jacobs, Nancy Patz and Ziva Eisenberg.

Fragile Fragments: Expressions of Memory raises an intriguing question: how is the Holocaust memorialized in the visual arts and how will it be remembered by future generations? The exhibit examines the complex relationship between art and loss as seen from the perspectives of four different female artists – Thea Weiss, Roz Jacobs, Nancy Patz and Ziva Eisenberg. Each of these artists worked directly with a Holocaust survivor to create their body of work highlighted in the exhibition.

Thea Weiss is an Australian artist whose series of paintings entitled “2065 – A Healed Memory” recounts the life of her mother-in-law and Holocaust survivor, Lotte Weiss, the only survivor of a close-knit family of eight Czechoslovakian Jews who were decimated by the Nazis during the Holocaust.

Roz Jacobs, is a New York City artist who has been exhibiting her paintings and drawings in galleries and museums in the United States, Canada, Europe, Russia, Israel and Japan since 1987. In “The Memory Project,” she focuses on her own family’s history to explore the convergence of memory, loss and the creative process. The subject is her mother’s bother, a young boy, Kalman, who was last seen in Poland during World War II.

“18 Stones” is a series of drawings created by Nancy Patz, in collaboration with author Susan Roth. The work consists of 18 drawings, each accompanied by a prose poem, inspired by 18 photographs from the Chaja Verveer collection at Holocaust Museum Houston. Patz and Roth offer what they call their small stones – 18 prose poems and 18 drawings, inspired by 18 photographs – to the people represented in the photographs, in an effort to pay tribute to a family of people whose histories were involuntarily, abruptly, dramatically changed or stopped short.

Ziva Eisenberg is an Israeli-born artist currently living in England. Her husband, Joe (Yossi) Eisenberg, is a Polish-born Holocaust survivor born in 1939. The inspiration for the “Holocaust Project” was sparked by listening to Houston Holocaust survivor and her husband Joe’s aunt, Celina Fein, speak of her personal experience during that time. Fein’s brother put his son Joe into hiding when he was three years old. Ziva’s work is presented in five drawings inspired by survivor Erika Blumgrundova’s poem “Thoughts.”

The public is invited to a free preview reception at from 6 to 8 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 4, 2010, at which some of the artists will discuss their work. Admission is free, but advance registration is required for this reception. Visit http://www.hmh.org/RegisterEvent.aspx  to RSVP online.

 For more information, call 713-942-8000 or e-mail exhibits@hmh.org.

Pictured above: Branded, by Thea Weiss, Courtesy of Thea Weiss.