Mercer Hanau - Constellations: TBA Archive Collages

I was the "artist in residence" for the following family history visualization project, led by Ken Winnick. Between summer 2023 and spring 2024, I guided the Archive Hearth Group at Temple Beth Am through the process of making collages and writing artist statements to accompany and reflect upon their art.

I also created a collage about my Jewish grandmother's life in Germany before she and her brother fled on the Kindertransport and how I am learning to carry their legacy forward (see Strength to Carry Both below).

Special Thanks:

Clergy and Staff of Temple Beth Am, for their joyous support

The Shoreline Historical Museum, for generously allowing us to use their archive space for our work group

Cultural entrepreneur and archivist Ken Winnick for his leadership, photography and printing assistance, curiosity, and enthusiasm

Temple Beth Am archive hearth group at the exhibit opening on March 8, 2024. (Left to right: Gabriela, Dennis, Sandy, Ken, Mercer, Jan)

Group Artist Statement

This project started out in one of Temple Beth Am’s Spring 2023 Hearth Groups, “Using and Building Archives”. Our group members—Ken Winnick, Jan Blauer-Chima, Gabriela Hannach, Dennis Barnes, and Sandy Ginsburgh Barnes—set out to explore and document our histories and share ancestral stories of courage, survival, resilience, activism, and joy.

While reflecting on what it means to be caretakers of family records and memories, we felt inspired to dig deeper and visualize our family stories for the wider synagogue community. We brought in a local artist, Mercer Hanau, to talk about exploring her mixed-Jewish heritage through painting, printmaking, and sorting through her own family archive. Together, we created collages using copies of documents, photos, and objects from our archives (no original artifacts were harmed in the making of this art!).

It can be daunting to construct a cohesive narrative from all the fragments left behind by past generations, but the process allows us to notice patterns within and between families and time periods. Fittingly, collage allows us to highlight the pieces that really speak to us from our collections and put them in conversation with each other in a multi-layered “constellation” of story-laden images. Like Jewish identity, the results are complex and nuanced. We hope that by sharing our stories, we encourage you to share your own. What do you relate to in our work, and what is different from your story? What objects and lessons do you feel are most important to pass on or carry into the future? What does it mean to be a good ancestor? How do we tell stories from the past to help shape a better, more peaceful future?

Click the images in the gallery below to enlarge.