Exhibit by German Graphic Artist Anke Feuchtenberger Opens June 26 at UMass Amherst

Image
Mutterkuchen book cover ©Anke Feuchtenberger 1995
Mutterkuchen book cover ©Anke Feuchtenberger 1995

AMHERST, Mass. – “Mutterkuchen,” the first major solo exhibition in the United States by German graphic artist Anke Feuchtenberger will open at the University of Massachusetts Amherst on June 26. Curated by UMass MFA student Bibiana Medkova, selected works by Feuchtenberger will be on display at the John W. Olver Design Building from June 26 through July 13. Exhibit hours are noon to 6 p.m. on Wednesdays through Fridays. The public is invited to celebrate the opening of the exhibition on Tuesday, June 26 from 5:30 to 7 p.m.

East German filmmaker Jörg Foth, who was an artist-in-residence at UMass Amherst in 2010, made a gift of 70 of Feutchtenberger’s graphic artworks to the campus’s DEFA Film Library. Foth’s film Latest from the Da-Da-R (1990) will screen at UMass on July 11, as part of the Public Film and Lecture Series accompanying an NEH Summer Institute on Culture in the Cold War: East German Art, Music and Film (cultureinthecoldwar.com/public-film-and-lecture-series/). Foth’s papers and library will also be available to researchers through the Special Collections and University Archives department at UMass Amherst.

Born in 1963, Feuchtenberger was raised in East Berlin, where she trained as a graphic artist at the Kunsthochschule Berlin-Weißensee. Shortly before the fall of the Berlin Wall, motivated by the East German citizens’ movement, she co-founded the political artists’ collective PGH Glühende Zukunft—a group that ironically called itself the “Glowing Future Production Collective.” In her comics, theater and political posters and other works, Feuchtenberger blends different artistic traditions, including German Expressionism. Her work frequently reflects her feminist activism by focusing on the relationship between women and their children and society. Since 1997, she has taught drawing and media illustration at the Academy of Applied Sciences in Hamburg, Germany.

The Foth gift significantly enlarges the archival collection of the DEFA Film Library at UMass Amherst. Prior gifts have included the films from the East German Embassy in the U.S. and the US-GDR Friendship Committee, both of which closed after German unification in 1990, as well as donations by other universities and U.S. citizens interested or involved in the former East Germany. The Foth donation, in addition to other collections at SCUA, establishes the start of a concerted focus East German cultural production by the DEFA Film Library, which will complement the larger UMass Amherst collection on the history of social change fostered by SCUA’s director, Rob Cox.

The Feuchtenberger works are being exhibited in concert with a four-week NEH Summer Institute on Culture in the Cold War: East German Art, Music and Film, co-directed by Skyler Arndt-Briggs and Barton Byg of the DEFA Film Library and the program in German and Scandinavian studies, in the department of languages, literatures and cultures.

MFA candidate Bibiana Medkova is a multi-disciplinary artist who works in installation, photography, video and sound. Their work has been shown at Benaki Museum, Athens, Greece (2015) and the Satellite Art Show, Miami (2016 and 2017). Their work has also been included in projects exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art (2017), MoMA PS1 (2015) and Petzel Gallery, New York (2017) and reviewed in Hyperallergic, ArtFCity and Feature Shoot. Their site-specific multi-media project Ghosted/Erased was at Smith College this past spring.

Major sponsors of the institute and accompanying exhibition and public film and lecture series, organized and hosted by the DEFA Film Library and German and Scandinavian studies, include the National Endowment for the Humanities; the College of Humanities and Fine Arts, DEFA Film Library and German and Scandinavian studies at UMass Amherst; and the DEFA Stiftung in Berlin.