Recollection: My Lost Yiddish Civilization

Recollection: My Lost Yiddish Civilization

Susan Schaefer’s collage series, part of Women’s Art Institute Summer Studio Intensive 

Artists Reception: July 8, 2016, 5-7PM

University of Minnesota, Quarter Gallery, Regis Center for Art, East Building

405 21st Avenue South | Minneapolis MN 55455

Left: Sura’s Storied Embodiment, 

archival family photographs, 

ink drawings on paper, fine art papers, found papers, and newsprint.

The ten intimate tableau are 8 x 6” and are evocative of the ten commandments etched in stone archival family photographs, 

ink drawings on paper, fine art papers, found papers, and newsprint.

Detail of six of ten

Recollection is the act of remembrance. To re- collect is to gather. The lost history of the Yiddish civilization is my history, the mysticism of the Kabbalah my spiritual center. 

In Recollection: My Lost Yiddish Civilization, I have constructed a remembrance of my own lost Yiddish ancestry and culture using archival family photographs, ink drawings on paper, fine art papers, found papers, and newsprint. I taught myself Hebrew script for this project.

Pen, paper and photography are my media. As a writer, poet, photographer, what better technique to use than fine art collage, a medium used to gather and glue diverse elements according to the rules of line, form, color, repetition and value to create an aesthetic whole, to breath life to my splinted story?

My intent is that the viewer access glimpses of the rich spirit of the Yiddish civilization which like these papers has been torn apart by millennia long dispersal, persecution, and diaspora. 

The ten intimate tableau are evocative of the ten commandments etched in stone.