Annual Martin and Doris Rosen Summer Symposium: Remembering the Holocaust

Registration and Expenses

Teachers can register now. The registration cost is $35.

Symposium expenses are $1,600, but full tuition assistance is available to cover the costs. The expenses include lodging, meals, events and workshops, and books and materials. Full tuition assistance is available for 35 registrants. To apply, register below.

About Marianne Lieberman’s Lithograph, “Survivors”

We are honored to feature Marianne Lieberman’s lithograph, “Survivors,” (1980) in the materials promoting the 24th Rosen Symposium, and we thank her family for permission to use the image of her work and the Conference on Jewish Material Claims against Germany and the German Federal Ministry of Finance for funding support.

Lieberman (1927–2021, née Windner) was born and raised in Vienna, Austria. Her father was a doctor who practiced medicine in Vienna. He was born into a Jewish family but was not religious. In her writings, Lieberman describes her unexpected discovery of her father’s, and thus her own, Jewish identity under the Nuremberg bloodline laws (1935), when one of his patients alerted him that the SS were coming for him. He fled Vienna that night leaving Marianne and her mother Adelle to fend for themselves. They took flight to the former Yugoslavia but then were separated when her mother returned to Vienna. Later Marianne, a teenager, rejected by her family in Ljubljana out of fear for their own lives, had to make the treacherous journey back to Vienna alone. She forever lived with feelings of being unsafe and out of place.

Marianne survived the horrors of World War II and Nazi persecutions from 1938 until 1945, and then emigrated to the United States as a refugee in 1947. She lived in Brooklyn, New York, where she worked as a dress designer and studied art on the weekends. She met Gerald Lieberman in 1949, the two married in 1951, and in 1952 they moved to Charlotte, NC, where Marianne continued to produce and study art at the Mint Museum of Art. In 1966 and 1967 at the Instituto Allende in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, she discovered lithography with Dieder Kortlang, which became her passion. She attended and received her BCA from UNC Charlotte between 1973 and 1975 and then won a scholarship to study at Penland School of Craft. In 1980 she studied with Keith and Flo Hatcher in Connecticut and in 1986, Marianne worked with Kappy Kuhn, a master printer, at Winstone Press in Winston Salem, NC.

About working with and painting on stone, Marianne wrote the following in her memoir, “Aftershocks” that she published in 2014:

     Stone has unique qualities that create abundant opportunity for the artist. Painting on this seductive surface invites abandon and risk, while also demanding discipline and reserve: abandon, because the risks can be so rewarding, and discipline, because the process is arduous. By grinding the stone to the desired grain, one obtains a pristine surface with the sensuous appeal of a windswept dune.

     It is as if the stone challenges the artist to a magical enchantment, a feeling of timelessness, earthiness—and pause—as the stone sits there, with its weight and immovability, its physical beauty and its lure, to receive the artist’s first mark. The image that results will belong as much to the stone as to the artist.

    — Marianne Lieberman, Aftershocks (Amherst, MA: Small Batch Books, 2014), 198.

Lieberman wrote the following about the above print “Survivors” (1980):

 This is a densely painted small stone with interlocking forms squeezed into unexpected situations, trying to preserve their identities, feeling cramped, stereotyped, out of place. A technically difficult lithograph, it includes one stone, two plates and one image-reversal.