On the NYR Daily: Black utopian space, Kentucky miners, art of the Terezin ghetto

Sponsored by [IFC Films]( Devan Shimoyama: Midnight Rumination, 2019 (Devan Shimoyama/De Buck Gallery) Today on the NYR Daily, we published [Antwaun Sargent’s review]( of two recent shows of paintings by Devan Shimoyama, at the De Buck Gallery in New York City and at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. I asked Sargent about the materials that Shimoyama uses, how the artist uses collage in his work, and what particularly appeals to Sargent about Shimoyama’s work. “I see a lot of influences in Shimoyama’s work,” he told me. “I see not only Chris Ofili, but also Mickalene Thomas—but what is interesting between, say, the way that Shimoyama’s work relates to Thomas’s is that they’re both using the language of collage to re-craft narratives around their own identities. They’re using glitter, rhinestones, jewelry, and the queer black figure to make their own universes, to remap the world in ways that allude to future possibility, but also speak to the demands they are making on the world now. In some ways, they are visualizing a black utopian space. “To me,” he went on, “Shimoyama is saying that there needs to be a diversity of thought that allows for different considerations of different bodies. To do this with paintings of singular figures and the texts they’re reading maps what’s happening in our contemporary culture where institutions themselves are being reconfigured, and I’m drawn to his canvases for that reason. “Also, in his Trayvon Martin February II sculpture—the way it visualizes remembrance after tragedy—Shimoyama is thinking particularly about how urban communities create makeshift spaces to remember those killed in tragic circumstances. It’s a big theme in Shimoyama’s work—how do you reclaim narrative, make your own narrative, in ways that have previously not been open to you?” —Eve Bowen Bennie Massie worked as a miner for thirty years: “It’s rough working. You are going into a whole new world, underground. I don’t advise nobody, no kids, nothing, to take that job.” (Ruddy Roye) In April, the photographer Radcliffe “Ruddy” Roye traveled to Lynch, Kentucky for the NYR Daily, to document the black miners in a town that once boasted the largest coal camp in the world. He found a community of fewer than 700 people, without industry, left behind and largely forgotten in national conversations about coal country that presume a white face. I wondered, what was the most surprising thing he discovered in Lynch? “How easily history can be subverted, changed before our very eyes,” Roye told me. “And how an entire group of people can so very easily be rendered invisible.” This afternoon, at the Frieze Art Fair on Randall’s Island in New York City, Ruddy Roye and I will discuss how his photo-essay [“‘They Will Remember Us’: The Miners of Black Harlan”]( came together, together with Marisa Mazria Katz from the Eyebeam Center for the Future of Journalism, which supported the project. —Lucy McKeon Leo Haas: Ghetto, Terezín-Theresienstadt, 1945/1966 (Ben Uri Collection/Leo Haas Estate) Earlier this week, [Jenny Uglow reviewed “Czech Routes,”]( an exhibition at the Ben Uri Gallery in London, featuring works by twenty-one painters, printmakers, and sculptors who left Czechoslovakia at different times in the past century. I asked Uglow to tell us more, in particular, about the amazing story of the artist Leo Haas. “Making art can be a form of bravery and defiance,” she told me. “Leo Haas, a Czech painter, book illustrator, and stage-set designer, was arrested in 1939, and after working in forced labor camps, he was sent to the ghetto of Terezín (Theresienstadt) in 1942, assigned to the technical department illustrating German propaganda. “When nearly 500 Danish Jews were deported to Terezín, and the Danish Red Cross insisted on an inspection, the ghetto was ‘beautified’ to make it look like a model camp. But Haas and three other artists managed to secretly record the despair and deprivation, arrivals and deportations, starving prisoners and hangings, hiding these works in an attic, in secret places in the walls and elsewhere. Some works were discovered, and the artists, accused of smuggling atrocity propaganda abroad, were imprisoned and tortured. Haas was sent to Auschwitz, before being conscripted to forge Allied money and moved to other camps. He was liberated from Mauthausen in May 1945. “After the war, Haas went back to Terezín where he discovered works still in their hiding places—and he and his wife Erna adopted Tomáš, the son of his friend and fellow artist in Terezín, Bedrich Fritta, who had died in Auschwitz.” —L.M. For everything else we’ve been publishing, visit the [NYR Daily](. And let us know what you think: send your comments to daily@nybooks.com; we do write back. You are receiving this message because you signed up for email newsletters from The New York Review. [Update preferences]( The New York Review of Books 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014 [Unsubscribe](