{"id":338612,"date":"2018-11-14T13:41:07","date_gmt":"2018-11-14T18:41:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/newscenter\/?p=338612"},"modified":"2018-11-14T14:01:01","modified_gmt":"2018-11-14T19:01:01","slug":"needlework-artist-evokes-detail-of-tragic-history-338612","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/newscenter\/needlework-artist-evokes-detail-of-tragic-history-338612\/","title":{"rendered":"Needlework artist evokes detail of tragic history"},"content":{"rendered":"

Memorial Art Gallery exhibition showcases Holocaust survivor\u2019s intricate fabric panels.<\/em><\/h3>\n

The intricate needlework and fabric panels Esther Nisenthal Krinitz created for her two daughters, simply to record her memories, are the subject of a Memorial Art Gallery exhibit evoking both beauty and tragedy in rich detail.<\/p>\n

Fabric of Survival: The Art of Esther Nisenthal Krinitz<\/em><\/a>, on view through December 2, chronicles the artist\u2019s bucolic childhood in Poland and subsequent decision\u2014at 15\u2014to go off on her own, with her younger sister, rather than stay with her family and neighbors who were forced on a journey to a death camp during the Holocaust.<\/p>\n

The 36 panels on exhibit are relevant in today\u2019s world, says Marlene Hamann-Whitmore, the museum\u2019s McPherson Director of Academic Programs.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt can be too easy to forget\u2014or never learn\u2014our collective history, and it\u2019s so important for our collective memory to keep it alive,\u201d says Hamann-Whitmore. \u201cThese atrocities are still happening, and sometimes art allows us to have conversations that are difficult otherwise.\u201d<\/p>\n

Though Krinitz, who died in 2001, had no formal art education, she was trained as a seamstress, which made textiles a natural conduit for her poignant story.<\/p>\n

\"art
“. . . As the road began to curve around the mountain, I realized how close we were to Krasnik, and I was suddenly terrified. . . ” Krinitz writes in the caption to a 1994 panel depicting her efforts to leave her home village. Esther Nisenthal Krinitz, Road to Krasnik, Embroidery and fabric collage, 1994.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Jonathan Binstock, the Mary W. and Donald R. Clark Director at MAG, says Krinitz could be labeled an \u201coutsider\u201d or \u201cuntutored artist,\u201d but her work \u201cis of an extraordinary quality and deserving of a place in an art museum exhibition program.\u201d<\/p>\n

Home to more than 600 textiles in its permanent collection, the museum routinely presents and collects textile works of art.<\/p>\n

\u201cSome people have something incredible inside them that they are able to convey visually, in material form,\u201d says Binstock. \u201cKrinitz was one of these people.\u201d<\/p>\n

Over the years, Krinitz filled notebooks with stories about what had happened to her, but she was 50 before she created her first panel\u2014an image of herself as a girl in the picturesque village of Mniszek, carrying water from the river up a hill toward her house and family. Her second panel, made a year later, showed her swimming with her older brother in that same river, while three of her sisters tend geese nearby.<\/p>\n

Krinitz produced the rest while in her 60s, the images detailing what followed: the Gestapo terrorizing her family; she and her sister fleeing across fields; soldiers leaving her alone only after being swarmed by bees.
\n\u201cDespite the pain that she experienced in reliving these memories so slowly, so carefully as she stitched them, it was important for her to be able to take them out of her mind and onto fabric,\u201d says her eldest daughter, Bernice Steinhardt.<\/p>\n

\u201cI cannot recall a time when I did not know my mother\u2019s stories,\u201d she says, \u201cbut during the roughly 10 years she spent creating most of these pictures, she talked about her memories even more than she had before. I think she was trying to keep them from disappearing.\u201d<\/p>\n

Each image includes meticulous hand-embroidered captions.<\/p>\n

The caption for the panel Ordered to Leave Our Homes<\/em>: \u201cThis was my family on the morning of October 15, 1942. We were ordered by the Gestapo to leave our homes by 10 a.m. to join all the other Jews on the road to Krasnik railroad station and then to their deaths.\u201d<\/p>\n

Recalls Steinhardt: \u201cShe always said that was the most difficult picture for her to do\u2014not technically, but emotionally.\u201d<\/p>\n

Krinitz\u2019s story inspired a 30-minute award-winning documentary, Through the Eye of the Needle<\/em>, which examines her life and work.<\/p>\n

The first two panels that Krinitz made, hanging outside the exhibition entrance, are being used to help elicit positive memories for people with Alzheimer\u2019s disease and dementia who visit to the museum every week as part of a partnership between the museum and the Rochester chapter of the Alzheimer’s Association<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The panels also are helping to spark conversations with younger visitors, and there are plans to bring in refugees as well.<\/p>\n

\u201cMaybe this will encourage other people to tell their stories,\u201d says Hamann-Whitmore.<\/p>\n

Fabric of Survival<\/em> is on view through December 2.<\/p>\n

\u2014Robin L. Flanigan<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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