Join us Wednesday, 30 October at 11AM EST for a conversation with:
Samuel Bak – Pucker Gallery Artist
Alexandra M. Cardon – Chief Curator, Samuel Bak Museum: The Learning Center
Mara Williams – Brattleboro Museum Curator Emerita
Dr. Carl Herbert – Gallery Associate
Caroline Staller – Gallery Associate
Bernard Pucker – Gallery Director
The WebinART will be an opportunity to explore and expand upon Bak’s most recent creations. He has often said that an artist usually has one or two foundational ideas and the rest is creative commentary. His newest body of work beautifully supports his theory.
The exhibition "Tools of Trade: A Visual Love Letter by Samuel Bak" is on view at Pucker Gallery through 5 January 2025.
About Our Panelists:
Samuel Bak was born in Vilna, Poland in 1933, at a crucial moment in modern history. From 1940 to 1944, Vilna was under Soviet, then German occupation. Bak’s artistic talent was first recognized during an exhibition of his work in the Ghetto of Vilna when he was nine years old. While he and his mother survived, his father and four grandparents all perished at the hands of the Nazis. At the end of the war, he fled with his mother to the Landsberg Displaced Persons Camp near Munich, where he enrolled in the city’s Blocherer Art School. In 1948, they immigrated to the newly established state of Israel. He studied at the Bezalel Art School in Jerusalem and completed his mandatory service in the Israeli army. In 1956, he went to Paris to continue his education at the École des Beaux Arts. 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, followed by solo exhibitions at the Jerusalem and Tel Aviv Museums in 1963.
It was after these exhibitions that a major change in his art occurred. There was a distinct shift from abstraction to a metaphysical figurative means of expression. Ultimately, this transformation crystallized into his present pictorial language. Bak’s work weaves together personal and Jewish history to articulate an iconography of his Holocaust experience. Across eight decades of artistic production, Samuel Bak has explored and reworked a set of metaphors, a visual grammar, and a vocabulary that ultimately privileges questions. His art depicts a world destroyed, and yet provisionally pieced back together, preserving the memory of the twentieth-century ruination of Jewish life and culture by way of an artistic passion and precision that stubbornly announces the creativity of the human spirit. Bak has exhibited extensively in major museums, galleries, and universities throughout Europe, Israel, and the United States. He lived and worked in Tel Aviv, Paris, Rome, New York, and Lausanne before settling in Massachusetts in 1993 and becoming an American citizen.
Bak has been the subject of articles, scholarly works, and over twenty books, most notably a 400-page monograph entitled Between Worlds. In 2001, he published his touching memoir, Painted in Words, which has been translated into four languages, and a biography entitled Art & Life: The Story of Samuel Bak was published in 2023. He has been the subject of two documentary films, was the recipient of the 2002 German Herkomer Cultural Prize, and has received honorary doctorate degrees from: the University of New Hampshire in Durham; Seton Hill University in Greensburg, PA; Massachusetts College of Art in Boston; the University of Nebraska Omaha; and Montserrat College of Art, Beverly, MA. In 2017, The Samuel Bak Museum opened in the Tolerance Center of the Vilna Gaon State Jewish Museum with an inaugural gift by the artist of more than 150 works. Bak recently donated more than 180 additional works to create a full representation of his career. In 2019, The Samuel Bak Gallery and Learning Center, In Loving Memory of Hope Silber Kaplan, opened at the Holocaust Museum Houston to house more than 125 works donated by the artist. A 2020 exhibition at the University of Nebraska Omaha led to the Samuel Bak Museum: The Learning Center, which opened Phase One at UNO in early 2023. Phase Two envisions a brand new, state-of-the-art, free-standing facility to house over 500 works donated by Bak.
Alexandra M. Cardon is the Chief Curator of the Samuel Bak Museum: The Learning Center at the University of Nebraska Omaha (UNO). Alexandra envisions the future museum as a collaborative space that celebrates Samuel Bak’s oeuvre and educates viewers on the realities of the Holocaust, while also offering exhibitions that explore contemporary artistic responses to conflict, human rights, and genocide. Alexandra has worked in art museums and taught art history in universities and colleges. She began her museum career at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice after which she worked at the American and Canadian pavilions during the 2003 Venice Biennale, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, and in the Modern and Contemporary art department at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. She moved to Omaha in 2012 and worked for the sculptor Jun Kaneko as his studio’s registrar and archivist. She is an adjunct professor in the Art and Art history department and the Honors College at the University of Nebraska Omaha. Her research focuses on mid twentieth century European painting, particularly the production of art in the interwar years and painting in France after World War Two.
Mara Williams assumed Emerita status in 2021, after curating exhibits at the Brattleboro Museum & Art Center for thirty-three years. Her area of expertise is modern and contemporary art. As a partner in Arts Bridge LLC, Williams leads exhibition teams for institutions developing new large-scale museum projects. She holds an A.B. in theatre from Boston College; an MFA in museology from Syracuse University and has completed doctoral course work and passed comprehensives in comparative arts at New York University. She is Chair of the Wolf Kahn Foundation. She has served as chair of the Vermont Arts Council and as a board member of the New England Museum Association, as well as three terms on the Senate Curatorial Advisory Committee for the U.S. Capitol.
Dr. Carl Herbert is a fourth-generation physician whose career has been devoted to helping infertility patients overcome a wide spectrum of obstacles to create their families. Early in his career he participated in the founding of one of the first eIVF centers in the United States. For more than forty years, Dr. Herbert has contributed to the growth and development of assisted reproductive technologies, continually implementing the evolving techniques and optimizing their clinical applications for care. The ambiguity of a socially awkward accolade, “You got me pregnant!”, has become a recurrent reward, both humorous and joyful. By serendipity, Dr. Herbert walked into Pucker Gallery for the first time in 1985 when visiting Boston for a medical conference. From this point on, his nascent interest in art grew under the generous tutelage and encouragement of Mr. Pucker. A close personal friendship evolved as they visited artists and exhibitions around the world; exchanged thoughts on the experience and intrinsic value that art, in all its many forms, can provide individuals and society; and shared writings which illuminated these principles.
Caroline Staller is a ceramic sculptor and educator. She attended New Mexico State University in 2011 and graduated in 2015 with degrees in Fine Art and Biology with a Biochemistry minor. She completed her MFA in Ceramics from the University of Missouri in 2021 where she studied under artists Bede Clarke and Joseph Pintz. Her small-scale tableaus and carvings of horses are peaceful and reflective with a focus on the beauty she sees in ‘simple’ objects both made by hand and found, which is reminiscent of her childhood exploring the desert on horseback and finding unique objects aged by the harsh elements. She has taught ceramic sculpture to both adults and children around Missouri and Massachusetts, including at Harvard Ceramics. Caroline currently works at her home studio as well as Pucker Gallery coordinating WebinART events as well as visiting ceramicist workshops around Boston, MA.
Bernie Pucker is the director of Pucker Gallery, which he founded with his wife, Sue, on Boston's historic Newbury Street in 1967. Pucker Gallery represents over fifty artists from around the world, presenting approximately ten exhibitions annually, often paired with artist talks, virtual “WebinARTs,” and Gallery receptions. Bernie is currently a Board Member at the Japan Society, Boston, and the Jewish Publication Society. He also serves on the Leadership Council for Facing History and Ourselves as well as the Artistic Advisory Board for the Terezin Music Foundation. Previously, he has served as President of Solomon Schechter Day School, President of the Newbury Street League, and Board Member for the Friends of Copley Square and The Unity Project, among others. Bernie received his MA in Modern Jewish History from Brandeis University and his BA in History and English Literature from Columbia College.