12″ by 16″ Framed by the context of acts of antisemitic hate speech on campus in the fall of 2018, a subsequent archival and oral history project on the history of the Jewish experience at Davidson (https://digitalprojects.davidson.edu/jewishidentity/), Michaela Gibbons took part in Scott Denham’s seminar “The Holocaust and Representation” in the spring of 2020. One of her class projects took the form of these five canvases, each represented by the percentage of blue pigment in white paint the percentage of Jewish students at Davidson over five decades, from less than 1% in the 1970s to 5% in 2019. The blue color she used is tekhelet, the hue mentioned in the Torah (Numbers 15:38) and used traditionally in Jewish life and culture, as well as in the Israeli flag. The modern tekhelet blue most often has hex code #075299 and is Pantone 2945 C.
These pigmented canvases were displayed on a shelf in Scott Denham’s office for the next year and a half, when in November 2021, Elias Mendel visited Davidson to present his graphic and digital artwork about his own experience as a descendent of Holocaust victims and survivors, which he did in a talk and ceremony in the Lilly Gallery at Davidson on November 9th, commemorating the Reichspogramnacht, known as Kristallnacht. (Eli Mendel’s great-grandfather Bruno Schwarz was arrested in the November Pogrom and held for a month at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Berlin.) The following week he led workshops with students on making “art from the archive.” He spotted Michaela’s blue canvases and asked if he could make a new piece out of them, which you see here with his repeated haunting faces, also in gradiated charcoal pigment density. He gave the reworked art from the archive series to Scott Denham, who donated them to the Davidson for Ukraine art auction.
Elias Mendal’s work can be seen here https://eliasmendel.cargo.site/Info and some images of his time as an artist in residence at Davidson College are done the page here https://writingofmemory.scottdenham.net/.
————————-
Thank you for considering a purchase from our charity auction. 100% of funds raised from this action will be directed towards the purchase of critically needed medical equipment to help Ukrainian medics save lives!
Because of your generosity towards this campaign, we can help many Ukrainian medical professionals by providing them with desperately-needed supplies. Our goal is to raise sufficient funds to purchase an ambulance that will help them rescue many wounded and others impacted by the war in some of the hardest-hit areas in eastern Ukraine.
Your purchase today will not only improve but save the lives of Ukrainian people suffering daily due to this unprovoked war.
