This article appeared in the January 13, 2012 Jewish Advocate.

Persistence, aided by calligraphy:

Memory in the forefront in new exhibit

By Susie Davidson

Special to the Advocate

For artist Fay Grajower, memory is tactile. “Central to my work is history and memory; the texture of memory and the unconscious elements of an inherited memory that shape our lives,” she explains in an artistic statement. In an approach both abstract and mindful, she populates her distinctive collages with signature intimations of past, present and future, while evoking contemplation about the world to come.

Grajower’s new exhibit, “Stones and Scolls,” opens at Newbury College in Brookline on Jan. 18; she will speak at an artist reception on Jan. 26. This is a rare local opportunity to view her work, which usually inhabits more exotic locales. Her exhibit/installation “Bletern: Images and Words,” opened at the Galicia Museum in Krakow 2008 and travels to Wroclaw (formerly the German city Breslau) in June 2012. Her exhibit/installation “Where the Past Meets the Future” opened in 2008 at the Galicia Museum before traveling throughout Poland to the Marcholt Gallery in Katowice, the Auschwitz Jewish Center in Oswiecim, the Biblioteka Slaska in Katowice, and the Czestochowa Museum.　Currently traveling through the U.S., it has shown in New York, Cleveland, Ohio and the Florida Holocaust Museum, and is scheduled for UCLA in 2012 and the Holocaust Center of Michigan in 2013. Her shows have been featured in Berlin, Bielefeld and Potsdam, Germany as well as in many U.S. galleries and museums, with recent showings at Skyline College in San Bruno, Calif., and the Florida Holocaust Museum in St. Petersburg.

Grajower uses not only art forms, but literary and linguistic media as well. She designs greeting cards and ketubot, and often incorporates Hebrew texts into her projects. “Text factors heavily in my thought and my work,” she said from her home in Brookline. “Phrases, words and letters form calligraphic marks, and as a shape and design they add layers of texture and meaning to the build-up of a painting.” She believes that a viewer’s perception can be shaped, and shifted as well, by recognized words in a painting. To add to the interest, she interweaves paint, sand, fabric, paper, stones, wood, and found and recycled materials into her work. For Grajower, the words, the art materials, and the past are all comingled. “Text is the fitting together of letters and words and phrases. Texture is the layering of events that make up history. Texture is the layering of materials that give body and surface to a painting,” she said. “Ultimately, texture gives shape and form to the work and to the present.”

In addition to the layered words, color and art elements. Grajower is influenced by “asides” that carry over from piece to piece. “The asides take the form of words, stories and distractions by working on more than one piece at a time,” she explained. “Each feeds the other as I struggle with any given piece.” Virtually everything inspires and calls to her: “Lots of loose paper, multiple images, just stuff in the environment that most people would call clutter, feed, engage, inspire and challenge me,” she said.

A New York native, Grajower studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and earned an M.A. in Studio Art from New York University. She was an artist-in-residence in Boca Raton, Florida, Mitzpe Ramon, Israel, and Erfurt, Germany. A daughter of Holocaust survivors, she is a member of the International Association of Genocide Scholars. Fluent in Hebrew and conversant in French and Yiddish, she also belongs to the Association for Jewish Studies, as well as the College Art Association and Women’s Caucus for Art.

Commissioned works include a painted, sculpted glass dedicatory wall in Wilmington, Del.; a Holocaust Memorial　Sculpture Installation at the B'nai Torah Congregation in Boca Raton; a Holocaust Memorial at the Young Israel of New Rochelle; and an installation for The International Women's Research Center at Brandeis University. Grajower's "Into the Woods," a mixed media collage on wood, was installed at the Children's Hospital's Family House at 241 Kent St., Brookline, as part of its “Art for Cool Kids” project, which features 100 original works of art by 65 local artists.

“The layers of a painting resemble the layers of memory,” she said. “To jar one's memory is to uncover history.” But in her art and spirit, Grajower reminds us that beauty and strength will conquer all. “We have great challenges before us,” she acknowledged. “But the resilience of the human spirit triumphs over brutality.”