Gallery Exhibitions
Explore the Katz Family Main Street Gallery
Take a stroll through the Katz Family Main Street Gallery, located along the main corridor of the MJCCA Zaban-Blank Building. Exhibitions regularly change to highlight both local artwork and pieces of art touring from our nationwide network of museum and gallery partners.
The Katz Family Mainstreet Gallery is proud to present an exhibition entitled:
INVITED TO LIFE
Photographs by B. A. Van Sise; featuring selected images and essays from the book Invited to Life: Finding Hope After the Holocaust
This exhibition is made possible by a generous gift from Cherie and Gary Aviv and is organized by the Arts & Authors Department of the Marcus Jewish Community Center of Atlanta.
Artist Statement
Girding against an étagère of conflicting memories, I interviewed all of the sitters seen here, beginning to understand that the survivors are, in some ways, as diverse as the nation they’ve come to inhabit: there are, in fact, people in these pages of many religions, many nations, who’ve built families of many shades and loves that were forbidden in their past lives. They had all survived a war and tragedy; they had all survived a pandemic and, in some cases, two.
When possible, I’ve photographed them with people who’ve had their own lives changed by the sitter’s survival—spouses, partners—as well as those whose very existence has been willed into being by their ancestor’s decision to brook no refusal of their future, to open a door for the many unborn and unimagined to come. There are husbands and wives, grandchildren and great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren. All of them talked about the sense of how lucky they’d been; all of them talked, in one way or another, about their sense not of survivor’s guilt but of survivor’s obligation. They had lived to carry their perfume among the perishing, owed it to the lost and to themselves to do something, to show the world that they were worthy, to let the world know that their membership here was not granted in error, to understand and work and grow as proof that they had not been just created, but invited to life.
Working with institutions throughout the country, my pandemic pastime became this: chronicling the overcoming of a hundred survivors across a continent, pulled from a rapidly dwindling population. It was not easy to do in a pandemic; it’s no overstatement to say that I made a poor doctor in Queens mop around my brainpan every two days for a year. But it felt exceptionally important: none of these stories begin with happily, but they’d all had at least seventy-five years of ever after.
As our entire society reboots, what lessons could we take away from those, too, who had started over from nothing?