News from the Samuel Bak Museum: The Learning Center at the University of Nebraska Omaha

Hillary Nather-Detisch and the Samuel Bak Museum: The Learning Center staff

With the inaugural exhibition In the Beginning is now underway, we would like to highlight some developments at the museum. The exhibition has been extended to mid-July, so that it will coincide with the Omaha Summer Arts Festival.

The museum is now fully staffed, with two new Assistant Gallery Managers, Sadie Bartle (recent ASU Graduate—BFA) and Roxanna Corral (recent UNO Graduate—BFA), and six student workers with majors ranging from Fine Art to Engineering, Computer Science, and Business (an international MBA student). They are learning how to give tours and have assisted in welcoming over 1,000 visitors since the February opening.

The regular programming now includes three recurring events:

• Bak Talks – 10-minute discussions on Samuel Bak’s life from a historical and Holocaust perspective.
• Meet a Bak – a monthly “lunch and learn” with Alexandra Cardon bringing an artwork out of the collection to view and discuss.
• Curator Talks – monthly Thursday evening talks with Alexandra Cardon, or a featured guest speaker, focusing on different themes within the collection.

Numerous donor events, museum partners, community groups, and classes are scheduled to convene in the space in the coming months, all of whom have been strategically selected to support the mission and vision of the Museum and University. The space is completely booked until the end of the exhibition, sometimes with two events scheduled per day!

If you are interested in learning more about the museum, click here. Please direct all questions to unobakinfo@unomaha.edu or the Office of Strategic Marketing and Communications at UNO at contact@unomaha.edu.

“Bak a Day”

Each day, Bernard Pucker or a staff member writes a reflection on an artwork by Samuel Bak, which is then sent out to a small group of Bak appreciators. If you would like to join this special tradition, please reach out to contactus@puckergallery.com.

When the Rainbow Breaks: H•O•P•E in the Art of Samuel Bak

Essay by Henry F. Knight

Four simple letters—H, O, P, E—belie the significance and complexity of the word they spell. For Bak, the work of building hope, or believing in the hope that others offer, requires engaging with the discarded and broken pieces of a previously trusted world now irrevocably shattered by the Holocaust. In landscapes, still lifes, and figural works, Bak gathers the layered elements of hope for us to contemplate and remind us that they hold within and among them a promise for rebuilding and renewal. At best, hope is a wager of trust embodied in the venture of going forth.

In his essay When the Rainbow Breaks, Henry F. Knight, the former Director of the Cohen Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Keene State College guides us through the multivalent forms of hope in Bak’s work, asks us to question what we see and look beyond the visible, endeavors to define what hope after the Holocaust looks like, and teaches us that the process of creation after destruction represented by Bak’s work is itself the ultimate act of hope.

An Unimaginable Partnership: The Art of Samuel Bak and the Writings of Lawrence L. Langer

In 1995, as Samuel Bak was working on a suite of twenty large paintings eventually entitled Landscapes of Jewish Experience, Pucker Gallery reached out to scholar Lawrence L. Langer, who had recently edited Art from the Ashes: A Holocaust Anthology, to contribute to the monograph. His willingness to undertake this effort would open a vast experience for both Langer and Bak. For nearly thirty years, they have participated in a creative dance of images and ideas that has expanded both of their visions. Langer has written with great insight and precision about each new body of Bak’s art. Bak has in turn been energized by his exchanges with Langer. Together they have given each of us an opportunity—to address the fundamental questions of moral choice and our responsibility to unite and not divide, and to address the past and behave in a more humane and respectful manner toward one another in the present and future. An Unimaginable Partnership gathers these words and images in an impressive and extensive volume.

IN THE WORKS:

BAK AND THE ART OF HIS TIME

Pucker Gallery will publish a biography on the life and art of Samuel Bak, written by art historian Ute Ben Yosef and based upon extensive interviews with the artist. The book begins in Bak’s early years as a child prodigy in Vilna, and follows his survival of the Vilna Ghetto, the HKP 562 Labor Camp, and life in hiding in a Benedictine convent. It discusses his emergence in Israel and Paris as one of the great conceptual artists of our time whose oeuvre bears witness to his experiences as a child survivor. It reviews the private art lessons he received, his studies in Jerusalem with trailblazers of the European avant-garde, and his time in Paris where he absorbed the second-generation abstract movement triggered by the horrors of World War II.

The book will be richly illustrated with works dating from the 1940s, some rarely before seen, which will greatly enhance the understanding of his art.