A Fugal Arrangment
2019-2023
Slip-cast porcelain lithophanes, porcelain stones, custom designed digital components and LED lights, lithium-ion batteries, 3D printed TPU, vintage furniture, vintage glasses, acrylic paint.
On view as part of:
Underneath Everything: Humility and Grandeur
in Contemporary Ceramics
Curated by Mia Laufer and shown at:
The Des Moines Art Center 6/2/2023 - 9/10/2023
Grand Rapids Art Museum 10/7/2023 - 01/14/2024
Contact Ferrin Contemporary for further information regarding exhibitions and available work.
Above photograph by T. Maxwell Wagner
The elusive and ephemeral nature of memory as both a personal and universal phenomenon is the focus of Rae Stern’s installation. A Fugal Arrangement presents a collection of interactive porcelain objects that upon touch light up from within, exposing for a brief moment a hidden lithophane. Through the manipulation of the translucent attributes of porcelain, and with innovative use of digital technology, the work poses questions about the relationship between object, memory, and time.
Stern created the Outside Time body of work as a visiting artist at Belger Crane Yard Studios In Kansas City. To establish a framework for community engagement, she invited local residents of Kansas City to share images and family narratives to be used in her work, alongside images from her own family and friends. The images that inspired the lithophanes portray daily scenes from pre-war life in communities across Europe that were later annihilated.
Lotti Halpern sharing family photos during a studio visit to the temporary studio at Belger Crane Yard Studios in Kansas City, MO, 2019.
The use of technology provides an unfamiliar experience with the familiar objects, advancing the potential of contemporary ceramics to offer an engaging experience. By inviting the viewers to touch the ceramic objects, the installation environment brings to life narratives and memories assigned to family heirlooms and explores the potential and limitations of porcelain objects as repositories for fading memories.
Stern sees an urgency in creating the artwork while survivors are still able to tell their stories and interact with the general public. The importance of the timing is amplified in the context of the ongoing international refugee crisis and the resurgence of expressions of racism, xenophobia, fascism and hate speech.
Loosely drawing from early 20th century commercial German designs, the porcelain teaware evoke the intimacy of daily familial interactions. To create the illusion of an image, Stern manipulated the thickness of the porcelain, allowing light to travel only through the thin parts of the piece. Neither projection nor pigment was used to create the image.
Material culture functions as a medium in Stern’s work and amplifies the sociological and psychological values encapsulated in objects that are traditionally (dis)regarded as functional. The bricolage of vintage pre- and post-war furniture was carefully collected and echoes the ever changing context in which the porcelain objects exist, being passed from one owner to another as time goes by.
Collected Memories
Elia Stern
Haifa, Israel
Miriam “Masha” (née Rosengold) and Yeshayahu Brahmson left Poland in the mid-1930s and immigrated to Mandatory Palestine with their three young children, Haim, Rivka, and Rachel. During World War II, many of their Jewish relatives who stayed in Poland were murdered.
In the years that followed, Miriam and Yeshayahu raised their children in Israel and spoke little of their devastating loss. On occasion, the discovery of a surviving relative was cause for great excitement. The teapot they brought with them was eventually passed down to their granddaughter Elia. It is still used on special occasions and serves as a reminder of the life left behind and the gap in the family history.
The Brahmson family, from left: Rachel, Miriam (Masha), Haim, Yeshayahu and Rivka. Poland, ca. 1934
Vintage postcard of the town of Suwalki. Poland, ca. 1913
Miriam (Masha) Brahmson (born Rosengold). Poland, ca. 1920
Ben Stern
Haifa, Israel
Ben’s paternal grandmother, Manya (May), was born in Pinsk, Russia, around 1885. After earning a teaching certificate, she worked as a teacher in a small village. At the time, repeated pogroms ignited by Cossacks targeted local Jews. Being the only teacher in the village, Manya and her family were hidden several times by the mother of one of her non-Jewish students in her basement.
After the failure of the 1905 revolution, Jews were increasingly persecuted and many Jewish organizational activities were outlawed. Manya and her family decided to flee Russia, traveling under difficult conditions by boat to the United States. In 1909 they settled in Philadelphia, where Manya met her husband, Alexander (Sasha) Stern. Alexander had escaped a gulag a few years earlier after being arrested in a demonstration against the czar.
The couple eventually settled in New York, where Manya worked in the garment industry and Alexander worked as a traveling salesman. They had three sons, William, Philip (Phil) and Victor (Ben’s father). At some point, Alexander left the family and moved to the West Coast. His sons never forgave him for leaving their mother.
Manya Goldwitz Stern’s graduation certificate from Tsar Nicholas II Gymnasium for Girls. Pinsk, Russia, 1903.
Elinore Noyes and Tjalda Nauta
Kansas City, Missouri
Walle and Ellie Nauta, the Dutch great-grandparents of Elinore Noyes, harbored a teenage Jewish girl disguised as a live-in nanny for their newborn daughter, Tjalda. The Jewish girl, Dina Dasberg Angress, survived the war and later immigrated to the United States, where she started a family, worked as a social worker, and later adopted a child herself.
The war and that dangerous decision changed the lives of both families and affected the narratives of the following generations. Elinore writes:
“My grandmother, Tjalda, has mixed memories of this time: of fear, bombings, and hunger, yet also of normality, laughter, and happiness. She remembers playing outside on sunny days while she also remembers the bombing of their neighbor’s house. Even during wartime, she and her family, including Dina, maintained familiar everyday routines. Yet the war impacted her long beyond its end in 1945. The experience of war shaped her directly for the time that she lived through it, but more so in the indirect effect that it had upon her through the experience of her parents, relatives, and Dina.”
From left: Tjalda Nauta and Dina Dasberg. Holland, early 1940s.
As Elinore continued to research her family history she discovered additional layers to the story. Her grandmother shared that her parents were the children of Dutch colonists living in Indonesia. Another photo showed the boat they traveled on from their home in Java, an Indonesian island, back to Holland to attend high school. Elinore writes:
"...seeing my family's direct connection to European colonialism was painful, directly positioning me within a lineage of white oppression and exploitation (...) As I learned about other survivors' stories, it became clear to me that the history of loss, oppression, and otherness my family both experienced and perpetuated was shared by many and had the potential to connect rather than alienate".
Ship arriving in Holland, early 1930s.
Susan and Michael Richter
New York, New York
Susan Richter’s Oma and Opa (“grandmother” and “grandfather” in German) were Hedwig and Leon Liebenstein. Prior to World War II, they lived in Mainz, Germany, where the Jewish community experienced prosperity alongside persecution for nearly a millennium. They left Mainz on August 7, 1940, fortunate enough to have the means and paperwork to escape. Their journey took them by air to Moscow, on the Trans-Siberian Railroad to Manchuria, then through Korea, on boat to Japan, and eventually to North America, arriving in Seattle on September 11, 1940. They carried a bit more than forty pounds each, including clothing, silver cutlery, and a few photographs.
Their daughter, Ruth, later joined them in the United States. She married Fred Lomnitz in 1945, and Susan was born a few years later.
Ruth Liebenstein Lomnitz. London, early 1940s.
From left: Hedwig and Leon Liebenstein. Germany, ca. 1930s
Jo Kamm and Marga Hirsch
Kansas City, Missouri and New York City, New York
Olga Hirsch and Max Strauss were an upper-class, educated, Jewish couple who lived in Germany prior to World War II. Born in Nürnberg in 1884, Olga lost her father at age eleven. Her uncle took her in and treated her as his own, developing her interest in spelunking and archaeology.
In her late twenties, Olga married Max Strauss, an ambidextrous orthopedic surgeon and widower. Max served as a medical officer in the German army in World War I and studied with Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen, becoming one of the first to use x-rays for diagnosis. The couple had a daughter together, Helene (Leni) Luise Marie Strauss. In the mid-1930s, the Strauss family realized that they needed to leave Germany. By then, Olga’s younger sister, Aennie Hirsch Elkan, had already immigrated with her husband to England. Olga and Max even explored the possibility of immigrating to Mandatory Palestine, but Olga had cancer, and they feared that she would not get adequate medical care there.
In late 1935, Olga passed away and in 1938 Leni fled Germany with her father and his new wife, Alice Kocherthaler. Leni’s older half sister, Elisabeth Strauss, had already left for Mandatory Palestine, where she married and lived in Haifa for the rest of her life. The family was not allowed to take substantial assets with them but they managed to ship out personal items, including photographic materials some of which was attributed to Olga who had been an avid photographer.
Olga Hirsch. Bamberg, Germany, ca. 1890s.
Birthplace of Max J. Strauss in Kronach, Germany, early 1900s.
Aennie Hirsch Elkan. Possibly photographed in Nürnberg or Heidelberg, Germany, ca. 1920s.
David and Miriam Ullmann
Haifa, Israel
The Ullmann family lived in Würzburg, Germany, prior to World War II. Simon and Perla had five children together: Julius; Henny and her twin brother, Yoni; Teodor, and Martha. Simon also had three daughters from a previous marriage.
By the time the war broke out, Simon and Perla’s children as well as their half sister Gita had immigrated to Mandatory Palestine. Henny went back to Germany in 1939 and did not survive after being deported to Riga. The two half sisters from Simon’s first marriage were murdered as well.
The Ullmann family, from left: Henny and her twin brother, Jom Tov Joni (Yom Tov Yoni in Hebrew), ages fourteen or fifteen; Perla; Martha, age ten; Teodor (David in Hebrew), age eleven; Julius, age twenty or twenty-one. Würzburg, Germany, ca. 1920
Rita Sudhalter
Overland Park, Kansas
The young woman smiling as she holds a large bouquet is Rita's mother, Rachel (Rose) Leah (née Zysman) Murawiec (Murra). During the war, Rose witnessed the deaths of most of her family members, including her parents and her two brothers. Against the odds, she managed to survive the Międzyrzec ghetto as well as the Majdanek, Auschwitz, and Bergen-Belsen concentration camps. Most of her extended family did not survive either.
After the liberation of Bergen-Belsen in April 1945, Rose met Natan (Nathan) Murawiec (Murra) in the displaced persons camp. Natan was the sole survivor of his family and had been involved in the Warsaw ghetto uprising. By March 1946 the two had wed while still displaced in Germany. In 1949 they managed to immigrate to the United States, where they settled and raised three children, Steven Murra, Janet Murra Bloom, and Rita Murra Sudhalter. Rita and Janet remember that although they grew up without grandparents or extended family, their parents' friends and fellow survivors were like surrogate relatives to them.
Rose eventually became active and lectured about her experience as a survivor. Natan, however, could never bring himself to speak publicly about the atrocities he had witnessed.
Rachel Leah Zysman Murawiec, age twenty-two. Germany, March 1946.
Carlota (Lotti) Halpern
Kansas City, Missouri
Lotti’s grandfather, Bernard (Beno) Katzenell, was a soldier during World War I and married Cecilia (Cilly) in the 1920s. In 1931 their daughter, Dina, was born in Munich, where Beno worked for a relative. In 1935 one of Beno’s uncles was arrested by the Gestapo as a form of extortion orchestrated by his estranged Christian wife. Beno and Cilly fled Germany to Austria with their two children, losing all of their property and belongings in the process.
After working at a factory in Austria for three years, in 1938 the family secured a visa to Argentina. In Buenos Aires, the couple, who had been used to a higher standard of living, now worked odd, laborious jobs to make ends meet as immigrants. At home they spoke German and occasionally ate traditional Apfelkuchen, but they never wanted to return to Germany.
In 1966, due to the political unrest in Argentina, Dina and her family immigrated to the United States through Miami. Lotti, Dina’s daughter, was a preteen at the time.
Bernard Katzenell in his mid twenties, wearing his World War I uniform. Germany, 1917
Acknowledgments
This fugal arrangement for the Outside Time installation was created at Belger Arts, Missouri (2019–2020), Breakroom Studio, New York (2022), Englewood Arts, Missouri (2023), and the Des Moines Art Center, Iowa (2023).
Stern would like to express her gratitude to curator Mia Laufer for the invitation to create this version of the installation for the exhibition Underneath Everything; Humility and Grandeur in Contemporary Ceramics at the Des Moines Arts Center, 2023.
Bringing this artwork to life was made possible with the generous support of Evelyn and Dick Belger, Asylum Arts, Englewood Arts, the Des Moines Art Center, and the Toni and Tim Urban International Artist-in-Residence Fund.
A special thanks and recognition goes to the following makers, tinkerers, and thinkers:
Digital interaction programming and production:
Craig Berscheidt
Production assistants:
Katie Pitre, Elinore Noyes, Saj Issa, Lucas Latimer
and Ani Kinney
Technical advisory to the lithophane and production processes:
Aya Margulis
Project advisory:
Michael Baxley, Tommy Frank, Ofra Bloch,
Cheryl Gail, Mo Dickens, Alon Harris, and Dan Saal
Preparation and installation at the Des Moines Art Center:
Jay Ewart, Jeff Ashe, Zac Quick, Tom Rosborough, Mindy Meinders, Megan Harrington, Sydney Royal Welch, Mickey Ryan, and Meredith Battle.
Stern would also like to thank the people who shared their family images and personal narratives in this artwork: Elinore Noyes, Susan Richter, Jo Kamm, David Ullmann, Lotti Halpern, Rita Sudhalter and Stern’s own ancestors.
With deepest gratitude to Elia, Ben and Yaniv Stern, the work is dedicated to Daniel Bard Stern, in meliorism.