Flight and Hope
August 12 – December 22, 2023
This exhibition explores themes of flight, journey, and migration through Samuel Bak’s oeuvre. His work, informed by his experiences as a forced migrant and refugee in the aftermath of World War II, offers a potent reminder of the humanity of migrants, their dreams of freedom, their flight from oppression, their search for home, and the fraught journey they undertake in the hope for a better life. As the poet Warsan Shire notes in Home, her response to the harsh reality if life as an undocumented refugee in Europe in 2009, “No one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark.” The exhibition paintings depict the ordeal of upheaval but also the hope and tenacity of those fleeing violence.
Flight and Hope will situate Bak’s works as part of a broader conversation about the status of refugees in 2023, the rising number of forced migrants across the globe, and the impact of changing demographics on the political discourse. Nebraska has been the new home for thousands of resettled refugees since the late 1970s, following conflicts in Vietnam, Bosnia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan, and Syria. Refugees have built new homes, created communities, and businesses in our state, turning the state in a “global heartland.” Statistics and research often dehumanize the experience of forced migration. Bak’s paintings remind us that those undergoing this traumatic displacement are human; that individuals caught in conflict long for peace and a home; and that hope is, despite all odds, eternal.
Exhibition genorously sponsored by Douglas County Visitor Improvement Fund Grant Award.
Inaugural Exhibition
In the Beginning: The Artist Samuel Bak
February 4 – July 16, 2023
Now extended through July 16, 2023
We are pleased to announce the extension of our inaugural show, In the Beginning: The Artist Samuel Bak, now through July 16. The exhibition features over fifty works that explore Bak’s artistic career from his watercolors done in the Landsberg Displaced Persons Camp in Landsberg, Germany, to his most recent paintings. He curated this selection of works to showcase his gift of over five hundred works to the University of Nebraska at Omaha.
The inaugural exhibition, In the Beginning: The Artist Samuel Bak, offers a chronological and thematic selection of Bak’s paintings and drawings from 1946 through 2022. The artist selected these works from the five hundred pieces he has gifted to the University to showcase the arc of his artistic career over eight decades.
The exhibition features watercolors and drawings done in the Vilna ghetto during the Nazi occupation of the city, abstract works from the sixties, and his renowned metaphysical paintings. Bak’s work weaves together personal and Jewish histories through a series of layered metaphors to articulate an iconography of his Holocaust experience.
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. This exhibition is a testament to the artist’s relentless wrestling with the legacy of the Holocaust and continued questioning of humankind’s propensity to violence.
