With artists Muriel Hasbun and Miriam Mörsel Nathan and writer Annette Gendler

Thursday, October 7, 7:30 pm
$10 General Public/$5 discounted member price*

According to academic Marianne Hirsch, who coined the term, "Postmemory describes the relationship of the second generation to powerful,often traumatic, experiences that preceded their births but that were nevertheless transmitted to them so deeply as to seem to constitute memories in their own right." The artists in this conversation are drawing upon powerful family experiences which although they did not experience first-hand, continue to reverberate through their identity and their work.

Annette Gendler, a Chicago-based writer, is completing a memoir that tells the story of her conversion to Judaism juxtaposed with the post-memory of her German family’s history in Czechoslovakia before, during and after World War II, as well as the post-memory of her Jewish husband’s family who survived the Holocaust in France and Russia (says Gendler: “Memories and rules are not your own but we live by them, are haunted by them”). Her work has most recently appeared in Natural Bridge, Kaleidoscope, and the Bellevue Literary Review.

Muriel Hasbun, photo-based artist, whose work deals with memory, identity, and place, is Associate Professor and Associate Chair of Photography at the Corcoran. She is a 2006-08 Fulbright Scholar and the recipient of numerous distinctions and awards, including a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Media (2008) and the Corcoran College of Art + Design’s Outstanding Creative Research Faculty Award (2007). She has exhibited her photo-based work at The MAC Dallas (2010), the American University Museum (2008), NYU’s Hemispheric Institute’s “Encuentro” at the Centro Cultural Recoleta in Buenos Aires (2007); the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego (2007); Houston’s FotoFest (2006), the Corcoran Gallery of Art (2004); the 50th Venice Biennale (2003); the Centro de la Imagen in Mexico City (1999); and at the 29ème Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie d’Arles (1998). Her photographs are in numerous private and public collections, including the Art Museum of the Americas, Lehigh University, the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

Miriam Mörsel Nathan’s work reflects the elusive nature of memory and its landscape of fragmentation, absence and vulnerability. She has been awarded fellowships in Visual Arts and Poetry from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and also received an Individual Artist Grant from the Arts & Humanities Council of Montgomery County. Her works on paper have been exhibited in New York, Washington, DC,  Virginia and in the official residence of the Ambassador of the United States of America to Israel, as well as published in the Spring 2009 issue of Hotel Amerika. She has read her poems at the Knitting Factory, The Jewish Museum in New York, the Smithsonian Institution, the U. S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and on cable TV’s The Coffee House. Her  poetry has appeared in numerous publications and anthologies. She has studied at the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting & Sculpture, the Corcoran College of Art & Design and the Fundación CIEC, Betanzos, in La Coruña, Spain.

*Price does not include a 25-cent service fee which is assessed at checkout. There are a limited number of free tickets for those who cannot otherwise afford to attend.