Yeshiva University Museum

This installation by Toronto-based artist and author Bernice Eisenstein features a series of luminous, delicately drawn portraits that interweave imagery and text. Eisenstein creates a gallery of prominent authors, journalists, artists, philosophers and other figures, most from the first half of the 20^th century, each serving as a repository of personal and cultural memory. Complementing the studies in pen and ink and in charcoal and gouache are choreographed arrangements of objects found or created by the artist as echoes and responses to the portraits. Eisenstein, the daughter of Holocaust survivors, generates a powerful statement about memory, its weight and its fluidity, inviting visitors to think about how memory communicates and where it resides.

The exhibition was made possible by the support of the New York State Council on the Arts and by donors and friends of Yeshiva University Museum.