Professional Development Workshop for MCC Faculty
Sponsored by the Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights Project
When: Monday, June 07
Time: 12:00 - 2:30 pm
Where: Monroe A, Warshof Conference Center, Flynn Campus Center
“The Changing Aesthetics of Holocaust Art and Memorials”
Presented by Cyril Reade, Associate Professor, Art History, Rochester Institute of Technology
This workshop traces the changing aesthetic of art and monuments that memorialize the Holocaust, from the post war period to the present day. The few Holocaust memorials of the immediate post-war period, such as Nathan Rapaport’s Warsaw Ghetto Monument (1948), employed figurative or neo-classical imagery. As Holocaust survivors aged, the importance of remembering assumed a new urgency. A modernist aesthetic in memorial design, introduced in 1982 by the polished reflective stone of Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial, spurred Holocaust memorial sites to adopt a modern abstract language. Individual artists, not constrained by the exigencies of commissioned work, remembered with a varied and eclectic postmodern vocabulary, taking up installation, photography, mixed media and graphic novels. These and other contemporary approaches solicit the viewer to participate in the act of remembering, recalling an event that recedes in time; this active remembering is not prescriptive, rather it encourages further investigation of the past and its relation to the present, prodding the participant to become an active learner of the lessons of history.
This workshop is free and open to all MCC faculty. Refreshments will be provided.
Tony Leuzzi
English/Philosophy
05/24/2010 |