A unique exhibition by Israeli artist Rae Stern called “In Fugue” opened last week at the Belger Crane Yard Studios and continues through Jan. 4, 2020. It features porcelain portraits of Holocaust survivors, including some from the Kansas City area. The artist will return to the area to speak at this year’s community Kristallnacht Commemoration, Thursday, Nov. 7, at the studios.
The exhibition focuses on the elusive and ephemeral nature of memory as both a personal and universal phenomenon. Through the manipulation of translucent attributes of porcelain and paper, and with innovative use of digital technology, the works pose questions about the relationship between object, memory and time.
Stern came to Kansas City to begin creating the artwork last fall and was here through the spring as a visiting artist at the Belger Crane Yard Studios. During her visit, Stern sought to locate pre-World War II images from the personal albums of local Kansas City Holocaust survivors and their family members. The images depicted in the porcelain lithophanes portray daily scenes from pre-war life in communities across Europe that were later annihilated.
Joan Israelite, development consultant at the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts, has met Stern and seen her “amazing work.”
“This unique concept of infusing pre-Holocaust photos of families enjoying everyday life into porcelain pieces that emerge with a touch on the opaque surfaces is emotional, unique and stunning,” Israelite said. “It is an exhibit not to be missed. Kansas City is fortunate that Dick Belger and Evelyn Craft Belger have supported Rae Stern’s creation of this work at the Belger Crane Yards Studios.”
The exhibition also impressed the family of Kate Lebovitz. Kate is one of the many local survivors who has a photo featured in the exhibit. Kate’s daughter-in-law Susan Lebovitz said viewing so many pre-World War II pictures of Holocaust survivors and their loved ones who were killed depicted in such a beautiful and unique art form “almost seemed reverent.”
“Rae’s attention to detail for period china, and display, and the art form itself illustrated how much she cares about this piece of work,” Susan Lebovitz said. “I know she spent a lot of time with our family, and much more with other people. This young lady cares deeply for the past and wanted desperately to show how they lived with peace, joy and love in their lives. And to see Mom and her parents in this exhibit … it felt wonderful.”
Stern, who lives in New York, collaborated with Aya Margulis on this project. In an interview with Stern last spring during the creation of the exhibition, Stern said she and Margulis, who had met in graduate school at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem, had begun discussing this project nine or 10 years ago.
“Whenever I went to visit a neighbor’s home or a relative’s home, most of the furniture was pretty simple, Israeli socialistic furniture, but there would always be an object on the shelves that was maybe slightly different, a different aesthetic, came from a different place,” she explained. “As a child I was always curious about those objects, they seemed so weird, and I know that if I asked them about them I’d hear a story.”
During their preliminary discussions, Stern said, she suggested to Margulis it might be “cool if we could make these types of objects and see the stories that they tell.”
Stern said that while they had ideas about how to bring the concept to reality during those initial conversations, they realized at the time they didn’t have “the technical knowledge nor the professional capacity to take on that vision and make it happen.”
But the idea never left Stern’s mind. With hate speech on the rise, about three or four years ago she decided it was time to turn this concept into tangible art.
“I wanted to tell the stories of people who were affected by hate and stories of people who had to emigrate,” she explained. “Those are people that had a story about a different place, a different time and usually it involved a story about having to leave that place in which they lived, whether it was escaping before the Nazis took power, right after, or sometime after the camps going home and finding if there was anything left, finding an object or two that can be taken with them.”
Both Stern and Margulis had family affected by the Holocaust. Stern said they both had seen the effects of it all around them in the people they met and the things they saw while growing up in Israel.
A lot of work went into each piece in the exhibition, Stern said.
“They look as though they are factory made but they are really hand made,” she explained.
Margulis built some of the molds in Jerusalem, where she lives, based on Stern’s designs. All of the objects in the exhibit were created by Stern in Kansas City. Creating the work required a community effort. At Belger Arts, Stern was assisted by several staff, including Michael Baxley, Tommy Frank, Katie Pitre and Joseph Hutchins. An intern from the Kansas City Art Institute’s ceramics department, Elinore Noyes, had supported the project for nearly three semesters. To create the digital components of the project Stern received help from staff members at the Metropolitan Community College and Hammerspace.
Stern hopes that when people see the exhibition they “feel the magic of touching the memory, not how it was made.” Referring to a photo of dinnerware looted by Nazis from Jewish homes in Paris she said, “These are all objects that were stripped of their memories.”
“These would have been sets in people’s homes. Maybe it would come out only for Shabbat dinner or for Passover and it would be passed on in the family. Not necessarily the finest or most expensive, but it would have some kind of sentimental value.”
Some of the exhibition’s photos come from her family and friends. Others were acquired through the help of the Midwest Center for Holocaust Education. The idea of photos coming to life inside these porcelain pieces, Stern said, is to bring back memory in the pieces, to reclaim their honor and value, and to remind those who see it that these people were ordinary people who lived everyday lives.
“When I edited the photos, I edited them in a way that removes some of the elements that place them in a certain time period,” she said. “When people see this, I want them to think of someone that they know and not look at it through the eyes of history. By understanding that this can be right now, I would like people to re-examine how they approach current suffering of others.”
Stern reiterated that doing this exhibition now is a reminder that this can happen again.
“Persecution is happening to people right now around the world. Maybe not to the same extent, maybe in a different type of story, but it’s happening.”
The Belger Crane Yard Studios are located at 2011 Tracy Ave., Kansas City, MO 64108. The exhibition is supported by Belger Arts, Dick and Evelyn Belger, Asylum Arts, and Joan and Steve Israelite. The exhibition can be viewed 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Wednesday to Friday and 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday.
