Bauhaus-trained artist and designer Friedl Dicker-Brandeis (1898-1944) brought the philosophies of progressive art education to the NSDAP ghetto and concentration camp at Theresienstadt, teaching drawing to imprisoned children, mostly girls, to inspire hope and self-expression under the most adverse conditions. While most of “Friedl’s girls” ultimately perished, Dicker-Brandeis’s surviving students spoke of their teacher’s remarkable ability to create a nurturing atmosphere where students could express hopes, fears and dreams as a temporary release from the brutal ghetto around them. Examining Dicker-Brandeis’s intellectual influences in Secessionist Vienna and the Weimar Bauhaus, Dr. Brandow-Faller’s talk focuses on Dicker-Brandeis’s brief but heroic teaching and exhibition career in the children’s homes of Theresienstadt, where art became a means of humanistic, if not physical, survival for its youngest inhabitants.
Dr. Megan Brandow-Faller is Professor of History at the City University of New York (CUNY) and teaches at the CUNY Graduate Center. She is a member of the Kingsborough Holocaust Advisory Board.
This event is organized by the Kingsborough Holocaust Center and is cosponsored by the Wagner College Holocaust Center.
Register in advance for this Zoom meeting here.