The Boston Phoenix, December 28, 2000 - January 4, 2001
The Year in Review; Bearing witness

Christopher Millis, Jeffrey Gantz, William Corbett, and Randi Hopkins

If "Witness & Legacy: Contemporary Art About the Holocaust," at the DeCordova Museum, brought us the letdown of piddling aspirations that succeed, it still had Gabrielle Rossmer's solemn group of five-foot-high bodiless open tunics and Seth Kramer's 15-minute untitled video in which he decides to count six million grains of rice (by the film's end, nearly a year later, he's made it only to one million). Closer to home, the ambitious, renegade, heartfelt "Distinguishing/Distinguished Jewish," at the Levanthal-Sidman Jewish Community Center in Newton, had six artists exploring with wit and openness what it means to be Jewish. And at the MFA, "Charlotte Salomon: Life? Or Theatre?" introduced us to the short-lived (she died at Auschwitz, just 26) German artist whose richly toned, expressionistic, autobiographic gouaches read like 400 pages from a book. You could think of her as a spiritual companion to her countrymen Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht; like theirs, her subtleties are brazen and her passions incendiary.