The Oklahoman, April 11, 1999
Powerful Exhibit Attempts to Cope with Holocaust

John Brandenburg

There may be no way for artists to deal adequately with events the magnitude of the Holocaust perpetuated by the Nazi regime.

But it's certainly interesting to see how they try to do so in "Witness & Legacy: Contemporary Art About the Holocaust," an exhibit of work by 22 American artists on display at the Oklahoma City Art Museum.

The exhibit was organized by the Minnesota Museum of American Art in St. Paul, Minn., and curated by Paul Spencer and Stephen C. Feinstein.

Netty Vanderpool, a Holocaust survivor and classmate of Anne Frank, offers one of the most austere, understated, yet telling approaches to the subject in a series of small, rectangular, geometric needlepoint wall hangings.

Vanderpool uses a broken mirror to suggest that "... All the King's Horses and All the King's Men..." can't put back together what was destroyed.

Kitty Klaidman brings a muted palette to acrylic paintings from her "Hidden Memories" series of an "Attic in Sastin" and "The Crawl Space" where she hid as a child.

Video artist Seth Kramer takes on the quixotic task of trying to make the number of Jews killed real by counting 6 million grains of rice.

Arnold Trachtman juxtaposes images of German and world leaders with piles of bags, eye glasses and bones in his photo-realistic acrylics, while Mindy Weisel transforms a heavily painted oil canvas and suitcase into a metaphor for "The Drowned and the Saved."

Gabrielle Rossmer uses photographs, copies of documents, a recording, painting and fabric-covered figures to tell the story of family members who did - and those who didn't - in a moving mixed media installation.

Marlene E. Miller makes a baby carriage, covered with bodies, the central found object in a mixed media sculpture that asks who will say Kaddish for Holocaust victims.

Judith Goldstein manages to deal with grim subject matter in almost naive fashion in her small collages of "The Crematory" and a cart of corpses being pulled on "The Last Journey" under a Nazi bird apparition.

A ghostly ensemble, including a man wearing a gas mask playing a violin with a branch, performs the "Last Movement," surrounded by weird, unusable wings, in one of several large, masterfully executed, surrealistic oil paintings on linen by Samuel Bak.

Much grimmer are Jerome Witkin's gritty, grisly oil painting of "The Beating Station, Berlin, 1933," and Shirley Samburg's grouping of seven contorted, scorched-looking, fabric-covered figures from her "Wrappings" series.

Conversational and informal is Pier Marton's "Say, I'm a Jew," a mixed media installation and videotape with children of Holocaust survivors wrestling with their own response to their Jewish heritage.

Two room-sized, intentionally claustrophobic, yet powerful environmental installations, which literally must be experienced rather than merely viewed as art objects, are Pearl Hirshfield's "Shadows of Auschwitz" and Gerda Meyer-Bernstein's "Shrine."

The exhibit is not easy viewing, but it's powerful, rewarding and instructive. It shouldn't be missed during its run through May 23.