The Art of Sam Bak

The Art of Samuel Bak:

A Conversation on Art and Memory

February 27, 2023

9:15 – 10:45 am (Manila time)

Zoom Link: https://tinyurl.com/uyzyv5ca

Registration link: Art and Memory

As part of the 16th DLSU Arts Congress with the theme, Engagement: Art, Memory, History, this special Arts Month event seeks to explore the intersections of art, memory, and history, exploring how art serves as an expression of memory or a repository of a people’s experiences. This conversation on the art of Samuel Bak aims to ponder how art serves as an agent to nurture public memory or to question it, and how it performs its historiographic function in tearing the mats of silences in histories and in fashioning alternate weaves of motifs and narratives that make truer and distinctive the heritage and values of a people, of a nation, of the world.

Speakers*

Samuel Bak was born in Vilna, Poland in 1933 at a crucial moment in modern history. From 1940 to 1944, Vilna was under Soviet and then German occupation. Bak’s artistic talent was first recognized during an exhibition of his work in the Ghetto of Vilna when he was nine years old. While he and his mother survived, his father and four grandparents all perished at the hands of the Nazis. At the end of World War II, he fled with his mother to the Landsberg Displaced Persons Camp, where he enrolled in painting lessons at the Blocherer School in Munich. In 1948 they immigrated to the newly established state of Israel. He studied at the Bezalel Art School in Jerusalem and completed his mandatory service in the Israeli army. In 1956 Bak went to Paris to continue his education at the École des Beaux Arts. He received a grant from the America-Israel Cultural Foundation to pursue his artistic studies. In 1959, he moved to Rome where his first exhibition of abstract paintings was met with considerable success. In 1961 he was invited to exhibit at the “Carnegie International” in Pittsburgh, followed by solo exhibitions at the Jerusalem and Tel Aviv Museums in 1963. In 2017, The Samuel Bak Museum opened in the city of the artist’s birth, on the first two floors of the Tolerance Center of the Vilna Gaon State Jewish Museum. In 2019, the Samuel Bak Gallery and Learning Center, In Loving Memory of Hope Silber Kaplan opened at the Holocaust Museum Houston to house more than 125 works donated by the artist. The Sam and Frances Fried Holocaust and Genocide Academy as well as the Natan & Hannah Schwalb Center for Israel and Jewish Studies partnered with Pucker Gallery to create Witness: The Art of Samuel Bak, an exhibition of Sam Bak’s works at University of Nebraska Omaha.

Bernie Pucker is the director of Pucker Gallery, which he founded with his wife, Sue, on Newbury Street in Boston in 1967. Pucker Gallery represents over fifty artists from around the world, presenting approximately ten exhibitions annually, often paired with artist talks, virtual “WebinArts,” and other public events. Bernie is currently a Board Member at the Japan Society, Boston, and the Jewish Publication Society. He also serves on the Leadership Council for Facing History and Ourselves, as well as the Artistic Advisory Board for the Terezin Music Foundation. Previously, he served as President of Solomon Schechter Day School; President of the Newbury Street League; and a Board Member for the Friends of Copley Square and The Unity Project, among others. Bernie received his M.A. in Modern Jewish History from Brandeis University and his B.A. in History and English Literature from Columbia College.

Mark Celinscak is the Louis and Frances Blumkin Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies and the Executive Director of the Sam and Frances Fried Holocaust and Genocide Academy at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. He is the author of Distance from the Belsen Heap: Allied Forces and the Liberation of a Nazi Concentration Camp, winner of a Vine Award for Non-Fiction, and Kingdom of Night: Witnesses to the Holocaust, winner of a Canadian Jewish Literary Award for Holocaust literature. He is also the co-editor of Artistic Representations of Suffering: Rights, Resistance, and Remembrance and the forthcoming International Approaches to the Holocaust. Dr. Celinscak currently serves as co-chair of the Consortium of Higher Education Center for Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights Studies. He formerly served as its treasurer and was the program chair for its 2019 biennial meeting. He is principal investigator of a UNO Big Idea, the Samuel Bak Museum and Academic Learning Center. Dr. Celinscak was a Pearl Resnick Postdoctoral Fellow at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. He has held fellowships at the Summer Institute on Genocide Studies and Prevention at the Cohen Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Keene State College; the Regional Institute on the Holocaust and Jewish Civilization at the Ray Wolpow Institue for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Crimes Against Humanity at Western Washington University; and the Summer Institute on Jewish Civilization and the Holocaust at the Holocaust Educational Foundation of Northwestern University. He also participated in the Jack and Anita Hess Faculty Seminar at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies in Washington D.C. In addition, he worked on the Arieli Foundation Holocaust Survivor Memoirs Program, interviewing survivors and editing their manuscripts. He holds a B.A. from Laurentian University, an M.A. from the University of Toronto, and a Ph.D from York University.

*Speakers’ bio notes taken from Pucker Gallery’s publicity materials for Icons of Alone: New Works by Samuel Bak (December 4, 2022)

Organized by The Office of Provost, in cooperation with the DLSU College of Liberal Arts Research and Advanced Studies Office, the DLSU Department of Philosophy, St. Scholastica’s College, Manila, and Pucker Gallery, Boston, Massachusetts.