How do you help people make sense of the millions of deaths that occurred during the Holocaust? If you’re artist Akiva Kenny Segan, you start with the wings of a bird.
Segan knew that many people found it difficult to comprehend the aftermath of the Nazi-led genocide of World War II: the deaths of more than six million Jews, along with millions of Polish and German civilians, Romany (often called Gypsies), gay men and lesbians. Such massive numbers proved too daunting.
He also witnessed people struggling to absorb the scale of other global atrocities, including the deaths, since 1998, of more than 5 million people in the Democratic Republic of Congo who were killed in conflict or died due to preventable diseases. Then there was the Rwandan genocide of 1994, which resulted in more than a half million deaths, and the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s that claimed more than 100,000 lives.
“It’s incomprehensible,” said Segan.
But Segan, 63, discovered that sometimes art can spark deeper comprehension of tough issues, including genocide. He said he hopes his wing-filled retrospective, currently on view at Hillel uw, at 4745 17th Ave. ne, will help to reframe global calamities by focusing on individual lives lost.
The exhibit draws from two of Segan’s artistic series: “Under the Wings of G-d” and “Sight-seeing with Dignity.” The nearly 20 artworks include drawings, watercolors, mosaics and mixed media.
The show runs until May 21.
Many of the pieces contain representations of wings, sometimes depicted rising from a person’s shoulder or back. In other pieces, a wing arcs across a canvas, a feathered visual floating in an ethereal world.
Segan said that for millennia, societies around the world have invested wings and feathers with a particular symbolism. “It’s the metaphor of the flight denied us,” he said.
Even though his work touches upon difficult moments in history, he said he wants his work to be accessible to anyone, including children. Oftentimes, young people tap into emotions elicited by the work that older adults repress. “They’ve asked some of the best questions I’ve ever gotten in my life,” he said of younger viewers.
Segan, who is Jewish, said when he was a child, there wasn’t a lot of talk about the Holocaust. But the silence he encountered in youth, in one sense, led him to understand how art could speak to masses.
Ending the silence Segan grew up in the 50s and 60s in Queens, n.y., in a diverse neighborhood where one-third of his neighbors were Jewish. Some had survived the Holocaust, yet people rarely spoke of the genocide. “At 8 or 10 or 12, I didn’t know a lot about it,” Segan said.
That changed as he grew older, particularly in 1978, after nbc aired a four-part miniseries called “Holocaust.” The nine-and-a-half-hour tv program introduced viewers to a fictional German Jewish family caught in the misery of a real-world atrocity.
Segan was studying printmaking and drawing in a Midwest college at the time, and in response to his newfound understanding of the Holocaust, he spent a night drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes as he expressed his feelings through art. While in graduate school, he tapped into his artistic skills several more times to address the genocide.
In 1984 he was living in Seattle, working as a library clerk, when he came across a flyer that announced a six-week trip to Poland to study art. He raised travel funds and during his time abroad, visited Auschwitz-Birkenau Concentration Camp, where some historians estimate more than 2 million people were killed. “It was like being hit in the head or punched in the stomach,” Segan said.
He returned to Poland the following year, but it wasn’t until 1991 that art and history merged for him. Segan had come across a photo book that recounted the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, when Polish Jews rose up against the Nazis. Segan found inspiration in the photos, which he drew on paper in pen and ink. His first drawing depicted an electric train heading through the ghetto. The train was marked with a Star of David.
On the wing When Segan finished the piece, he thought it looked kind of plain. He’d heard that the Burke Museum had bird specimens that weren’t on display, and he was allowed to view the ornithological catalogue. He took along the drawing of the electric train and sketched a wing on one side of the vehicle. Several days later he revisited the museum and graced the other side of train with a second wing.
It was the start of “Under the Wings of G-d.” The early works, rendered in pen and ink, also arise from the book: a father from the Warsaw ghetto, his head framed by blue and yellow appendages that resemble parrot wings, comforts the daughter; a physically disabled boy and a middle-aged man share a pedicab adorned with giant wings. He exhibited some of the artwork at Hillel uw in 1992.
While people felt drawn to wings, he discovered that the events of wwii didn’t resonate with many young people. “I call it ancient history,” he said.
He started making pieces that tapped into contemporary culture, such as the 1978 assassination of openly gay politician Harvey Milk, and a
teen who was murdered in 2001 by members a neo-Nazi group. The latter piece is adorned with actual feathers from a ring-necked pheasant. He called the series chronicling more recent events “Sight-seeing with Dignity,”
Unlike his earlier works, many of the later pieces incorporate color. He also branched out from pen and ink to mosaics, pieces as wide and tall as an adult’s outstretched arms. “The mosaics, those are my babies,” he said.
Art in transformation Segan said he hopes his whole body of work causes viewers to do more than just consider the lives lost through atrocity: He wants people to experience the transformative power of art.
Segan said he’s seen it happen when facilitating discussions with students who view his work. He shows them several pieces and then asks a question: If the Holocaust is about displacement — or loss, or separation, or fear — how would you depict it? Then he gives them time to draw.
Earlier versions of the question caused many young children to draw militaristic images of tanks and guns and helicopters, he said. Segan recalibrated his query to permit people to delve into their artistic consciousness. He said some of the results have been very moving.
Segan said that in the future, he’d like to address other issues through his art: the number of deaths caused by tobacco addiction (Segan quit smoking decades ago) and the lives lost to gun violence in the United States. “I call it the American genocide,” he said of gun deaths.
As for the recurring imagery of wings, Segan said that he doesn’t want to tell viewers how to interpret what they see. Still, he’s aware the image has power, one that speaks to the millions of lives lost in genocides throughout history.
“People in war camps and concentration camps can’t put on wings and fly away,” he said.