MANHATTAN COLLEGE TO PRESENT ART EXHIBIT ON THE HOLOCAUST

RIVERDALE, N.Y. – A collection of Holocaust works of art by artist Marty J. Kalb will go on display November 2 at the Manhattan College O’Malley Library. The exhibit, which will run until November 24, will kick off on Tuesday, November 1 at 7:30 p.m. with a lecture by visiting scholar Claudia Koonz. Koonz, a professor of history at Duke University, will deliver a lecture titled, How Racism Became Respectable: An Exploration of Nazi Public Culture.

Sponsored by the College’s Holocaust Resource Center and the archives department, the Holocaust art exhibit includes 20 charcoal on paper pieces by Kalb, who is a professor of fine arts at Ohio Wesleyan University. The artwork includes representations of actual documented events and original contemporary photographs. Each image represents a unique event based on the factual and emotional tragedy of the Holocaust.

Kalb’s drawings are visually captivating and hauntingly poignant. The exhibit will feature the work “Treblinka,” which presents a mass grave of silent bodies at the Polish extermination camp. Another work, “Expulsion,” reveals two naked, emaciated individuals being cast away, echoing a long, sullied history of Jewish expulsion. In the piece “Killing Four Jews,” the viewer is forced to stand in line with the executioner as a culpable bystander witnessing the murder of four innocents who hold hands in fright and solidarity.

Through creative and aesthetic means, the artwork compels the viewer to consider actual historical events in hopes of increasing an intellectual and emotional awareness. This exhibit, Kalb says, “confronts the viewer with some of the worst instances of torture, suffering and the industrialization of murder by a modern government for the sole purpose of killing Jews and ‘undesirables’.”

The Manhattan College Holocaust Resource Center was established in 1996 to promote Catholic-Jewish dialogue and to educate people about the Holocaust and its significance for the present.

If you have questions about this exhibit, please call Amy Surak, Manhattan College archivist, at (718) 862-7139. The College is located at West 242nd Street near Broadway in the Riverdale section of the Bronx, one mile from the Westchester County line, and accessible by MTA subway line 1. For directions to the College, visit www.manhattan.edu/about/directions.shtml.

Founded in 1853, Manhattan College is an independent, Catholic, coeducational institution of higher learning offering more than 40 major programs of study in the areas of arts, business, education, engineering and science, along with graduate programs in education and engineering.