On Tuesday, 22 March at 12:00PM, Pucker Gallery partnered with the JCC Greater Boston as part of their Culture Club series, for a live discussion with Pucker Gallery Artist, Samuel Bak, Adult Engagement Program Manager for JCC Greater Boston, Amy Eisner, Professor Gary Phillips of Wabash College and Gallery Director, Bernie Pucker.

This event featured a retrospective of Samuel Bak’s art as well as a focus on his newest body of work: Figuring Out. Born in 1933 in Vilna and recognized as a prodigy, Bak speaks about his evolution through the Holocaust and his continued exploration of the questions of our moral responsibility to repair our world.

The Exhibition, Figuring Out: New Work by Samuel Bak will be on view at the Gallery from 5 March through 24 April 2022.

Gary A. Phillips returned to full-time teaching in 2015 after serving for eight years as Wabash’s Dean of the College (2006-2014). Before coming to Wabash, Prof. Phillips taught at the College of the Holy Cross and The University of the South: Sewanee, where he served as Department Chair and Director of Sewanee’s First Year Program (and also owned and operated a pizza restaurant and café). His current teaching and research interests focus upon the Bible and its relationship to Western art and culture, issues of violence and religion, and the ethics of reading and teaching the Bible after the Holocaust. Ethical questions related to interpreting the Bible in light of suffering and atrocity, past and present, are perennial concerns.

Prof. Phillips is the author, co-author, editor, or translator of eleven books and more than 70 articles. His most recent book focuses on the artwork of Holocaust survivor and painter Samuel Bak. Prof. Phillips has participated in the summer seminar of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies investigating the historical tie between anti-Semitism and Christian theology as well as offered workshops on pedagogical issues related to the teaching of the Holocaust.

Convinced that a liberal arts education best prepares a person for wrestling with the central, most difficult human questions, Prof. Phillips is a first-generation college graduate whose family came from the coal mine country of central West Virginia. His life was altered by liberal arts teachers who modeled the art of asking questions. His spouse, Alice Phillips, is the Program Coordinator for Secondary Licensure at Wabash. They are the proud parents of three adult children and two teenage grandsons. When not in the classroom, Prof. Phillips can be found cycling on the back roads of Montgomery County, visiting family in New York City, or installing ceramic tile

Samuel Bak was born on August 12, 1933 in Vilna, Poland at a crucial moment in modern history. From 1940 to 1944, Vilna was under first Soviet, then German occupation. While both he and his mother survived, his father and four grandparents all perished at the hands of the Nazis. At the end of World War II, he and his mother fled to the Landsberg Displaced Persons Camp. Here, he was enrolled in painting lessons at the Blocherer School, Munich. Bak’s studies continued as he immigrated to Israel, and he later received a grant to pursue his studies in Paris.

In 1959, he moved to Rome where his first exhibition of abstract paintings was met with considerable success. In 1961, he was invited to exhibit at the "Carnegie International" in Pittsburgh. And, in 1963 two one-man exhibitions were held at the Jerusalem and Tel Aviv Museums. It was subsequent to these exhibitions, during the years 1963-1964, that a major change in his art occurred. There was a distinct shift from abstract forms to a metaphysical figurative means of expression. Ultimately, this transformation crystallized into his present pictorial language.

Since 1959, Samuel Bak has had solo exhibitions at private galleries in New York, Boston, London, Paris, Berlin, Munich, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Zurich, Rome and other cities around the world. Numerous large retrospective exhibitions have been held in major museums, universities, and public institutions around the globe.

Since Pucker Gallery’s establishment in 1967, Gallery Owner and Director Bernie Pucker and his wife, Sue, have expanded the collection to include artists from New England and around the globe, exhibiting a breadth of both 2D and 3D fine art. The gallery has exhibited Samuel Bak's work since 1969.