Hanukah lamp for a synagogue, mid-19th C., Bohemia, Czechoslovakia. Art 2016. Ink, gouache, colored pencil
© A K Segan
To mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day, a talk by artist and tolerance educator Akiva K. Segan will be at 3:30 p.m. Thursday, January 30, in Stevenson Hall, room 219.
This talk is sponsored by the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures. All members of the ISU community are invited to attend this free event.
Born and raised in New York, Segan studied art at Parkland College in Champaign, Illinois, and at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale. Following graduate school in Missouri, he moved to Seattle. He later studied in Poland in the summers of 1984 and 1985.
In 1991 he began his magnum opus “Under the Wings” art series. With 71 works now completed—including 10 monumental mosaic-drawing combos—the series portrays victims of the Holocaust and of Fascism in Europe of the WWII years.
In 2003 he began Sight-Seeing with Dignity, a companion human rights art series. It has 38 drawings completed. With the exception of a drawing portraying a 1930s lynching victim, all of the other SWD drawings are of victims of human rights atrocities worldwide since the mid 1970s.
He has guest taught in schools, colleges, universities, art museums, houses of worship, and other venues in seven U.S. states and in Britain. He has also taught in Israel during seven teaching trips, including three International Conferences on the Holocaust and Education at the International School for Holocaust Education, Yad Vashem, Jerusalem.
Art in both series are designed to be accessible to audiences of all ages, especially younger and older children, teens, young adults, and adults of all ages.
In tandem with his PowerPoint classes or exhibits, Segan leads an art therapy-oriented Drawing-for-Healing workshop. It is designed to offer a safe environment in a group setting to process and heal from the difficulty we all face in learning about genocides past and present, and the daily onslaught of national and world news of mass shootings, deadly storms, fires, wars, and more.
Find out more about Segan on his website. For additional information on the talk, contact Professor Jonathan Druker.
