Content Warning: This article contains discussions of the Holocaust and the Cambodian Genocide.
The William Benton Museum of Art at the University of Connecticut hosted an “Art Encounters” workshop on Oct. 18. Titled “The Residue of Memory.” This two-part workshop was focused on art that has a connection to the past, and specifically involved the work of prominent artists Yishai Jusidman and Binh Danh. After the attendants learned about the work of these two artists, they had the opportunity to create a specialized print known as a cyanotype.
The workshop was led by museum curator Amanda Douberley and UConn student Remi Benton, an art history major and museum gallery guard. Benton had also interned at the museum this past summer.
Douberley opened the workshop by discussing the relationship between memorials and art before leading the group into the “Prussian Blue” exhibit in the museum, with works by Yishai Jusidman. “Prussian Blue” is a series of paintings by Jusidman that depict various scenes of concentration camps from the Holocaust.
The primary painting by Jusidman that Douberley focused on was his 2011 painting “Auschwitz,” a work of art that depicts the open door to a gas chamber in the titular concentration camp. This painting is done entirely in Prussian blue — including the crushing darkness inside the chamber itself.
Remi Benton touched upon the meaning of the color itself, which Jusidman used in every painting in the exhibit. The Nazis of World War II had “used a cyanide-based pesticide,” Benton explained, which would “release Prussian blue on the walls.” The inner walls of gas chambers would thus be coated in the same color, which Jusidman had captured in his work.
“There would be trails of Prussian blue going down the walls,” Benton said. “It was the last thing people would see inside the chambers.”
Yishai Jusidman is “a Mexican artist of Jewish heritage currently based in Los Angeles,” according to a press release from the Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education. “While the challenges of dealing with the Holocaust’s legacy were mostly eschewed by post-war painters, Jusidman proposes that painting might in fact reflect, and not only reflect on the Holocaust,” the press release explains. “The imagery submitted by his brush captures—or rather recaptures—both excruciating presences and overwhelming desolation, plunging us into the labyrinths of historical and common memory.”
Douberley and Benton then took the group to the work of a different artist, an American of Vietnamese descent known as Binh Danh. Danh invented the artistic process of chlorophyll printing, according to the New York Times, which he achieved by “baking his images onto natural canvases with wild grasses and leaves.”
The two pieces of Danh’s located at the Benton Museum are “Found Portrait #195 from the Human/Nature Series” and “Ancestral Altar #9,” both of which were created in 2005. These two works of art are separate portraits that have been printed onto large Nasturtium leaves through Danh’s chlorophyll printing technique.
“Ancestral Altar #9” is a piece of one of Danh’s larger projects, known as the “Ancestral Altars” — each piece of work in this series is a chlorophyll print of someone who had died in a security prison during the Cambodian genocide, according to Danh’s website.
This schoolhouse-turned-prison, known by the names S-21 and Tuol Sleng, had confined the Khmer Rouge’s prisoners according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The museum estimates between 14,000 and 17,000 prisoners had been kept inside, but only 12 are believed to have survived. The jailers at the prison had kept records while it was operating, including mugshots of each individual prisoner.
As these photographs are still available, Danh turned a select few into prints. “To honor these lives, I made altars of the dead—a place where we can meditate on history, the present moment, and our own mortality,” Danh’s website reads. “I believe that even when faced with the truth that we will die someday, we can live a good life and do good for others.”
After the attendants of the event had had the chance to learn about the work of Danh and Jusidman, Douberley and Benton led the group in the creation of their own works of art in the form of cyanotypes. These specialized prints involve using the sun to print a white image onto a Prussian blue background — a perfect mix between the work of Danh and Jusidman. The event’s attendants printed images of leaves and sticks onto paper, which they could then take home and rinse to get the full piece.
Yishai Jusidman’s “Prussian Blue” exhibit will be available for viewing at the Benton until Dec. 15, 2024. The gallery that includes Danh’s work, known as “Encounters with the Collection: Art and Human Rights,” will be available at the Benton until July 28, 2025.
The next event at the Benton is their upcoming open house on Nov. 7. The next “Art Encounters” event, titled “Art Encounters: The Culture of Collage” will focus on the work of Melvin Edwards, Paul Scott and Sukanya Rahman, and will take place on Nov. 15.