Woman, the Spirit of the Universe
2003-01-13 - 2023-06-25 | Lester and Sue Smith Human Rights Gallery
Woman, the Spirit of the Universe features stunning bronze collars inspired by 23 American heroines who fought bravely and tirelessly for equality. The collars are stitched by hand using hand-worked cotton and then cast in bronze. For most of us, a collar is simply an adornment for a shirt or dress. In Carolyn Marks Johnson’s art, a collar symbolizes the struggle to establish women’s rights.
The women featured in the exhibition span generations, from Margaret Brent, who practiced de facto law in the late 1600s to two giants of Texas politics, Governor Ann Richards and Representative Barbara Jordan. Other leading women in the exhibition include Dolores Huerta, who championed labor rights; Chief Wilma Mankiller, first female chief of the Cherokee Nation; Sojourner Truth, who carried the message of abolition to every part of America she could reach; and abolitionist and social activist Harriet Tubman, known for freeing enslaved people through the Underground Railroad.
The most recognizable collar of the exhibition represents the late Associate Justice of the Supreme Court Ruth Bader Ginsburg, affectionately known as Notorious RBG. Ginsburg wore different collars to express a variety of messages while sitting on the court, inspiring young girls and women of all ages to speak up for things they believe in.
Johnson just completed two new collars that will debut in the HMH exhibition to honor former Houston Mayor Annise Parker and the city’s first librarian Julia B. Ideson. Parker, a longtime public servant and one of the first openly gay mayors of a major U.S. city, served as Houston Mayor from 2010 to 2016. She is a former HMH board member and 2010 recipient of the Museum’s Guardian of the Human Spirit Award. Since 2017, Parker has served as president of the Gay and Lesbian Victory Fund and Leadership Institute. Julia B. Ideson was in the first class to major in the new discipline of Library Science at The University of Texas. Hired in 1903, she managed Houston’s library services until her death in 1945. Ideson is known for starting five neighborhood libraries and creating the first bookmobile. She was also active in the women’s suffrage movement, the League of Women Voters, and was the first Houston woman listed in Who’s Who in America.
In 1985, Carolyn Marks Johnson graduated from South Texas College of Law in Houston, Texas. After a prominent career as a lawyer, Johnson served as a senior district judge in Harris County. During her spare time, Johnson was a docent for the Heritage Society and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH). Johnson then decided to enroll at The Glassell School of Art and graduated with a painting degree in 2014. Today, when not sitting by assignment as a retired senior district judge, arbitrator, mediator, umpire, she studies sculpture and is actively involved in women’s rights.
The late Philip Renteria (1947-1999), a friend and sculpture teacher at The Glassell School of Art, suggested the title of the exhibit and the idea in conversation with Johnson about one of his own works. He believed that the spirit of the universe is feminine, and a woman’s spirit holds the universe together.

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The Life and Art of Alice Lok Cahana
2023-02-03 - 2023-04-09 | Josef and Edith Mincberg Gallery
Alice Lok Cahana, «Tree of Life,» oil and mixed media on canvas, on loan from Drs. Judith and Harvey Rosenstock.

Alice Lok Cahana, «Tree of Life,» oil and mixed media on canvas, on loan from Drs. Judith and Harvey Rosenstock.

Alice Lok Cahana, «Untitled,» date unknown, acrylic on canvas, on loan from Arline Guefen

Alice Lok Cahana, «Untitled,» date unknown, acrylic on canvas, on loan from Arline Guefen

Celebrated artist and Holocaust survivor Alice Lok Cahana made a vow as she faced the horrors of Auschwitz, and later, the Bergen-Belsen camp – if she survived, she would not hate those who imprisoned her and, she later learned, those who murdered her family. «If I hate,» Cahana often told friends, «That means Hitler would’ve won.»
Alice Cahana passed away in 2017, however, her story lives on through a prolific collection of abstract artwork that illustrates her experience during the Holocaust and memorializes the lives lost. Holocaust Museum Houston will celebrate Cahana, not only as an artist, but as a devoted friend, loving mother and resilient survivor, with the opening of The Life and Art of Alice Lok Cahana, on view February 3 through April 9, 2023, in the Josef and Edith Mincberg Gallery.
The exhibition of more than a dozen multi-media works includes two large pieces, “Have You Seen My Sister?” and “Bergen-Belsen”, on loan from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, five works owned by HMH, and various unique paintings and one sculpture on loan from local friends and collectors. A video component of the exhibition will showcase personal stories and memories about Alice told by family and friends of the artist.
Alice grew up in Sárvár, Hungary, and at the age of 15 was transported to Auschwitz with her family as part of the massive deportation of Hungarian Jews. Liberated in 1945 from Bergen-Belsen, Alice was one of the fortunate few who survived.
In 1957, she moved to Houston where she studied art at the University of Houston and Rice University. Her early paintings were abstract color fields, reflecting the painting style that dominated Houston in the 1950s and 1960s. Paintings in this style relied heavily on color and flat surfaces devoid of representation. In the late 1970s, after a visit to her family’s former home in Hungary, began to create work through a new kind of mark-making, employing collage, along with an abstract visual language that could more directly express her memorial to the dead. She believed that her work had to be about the transcendence of the human spirit, the triumph of human spirituality over inhuman evil.
Alice Cahana’s work appears in prestigious collections around the world including Yad Vashem, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Holocaust Museum Houston, and her painting “No Names” is the only piece of Holocaust art on permanent display at the Vatican Museum in Rome.

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Neighbors 1938 “We were all Ladenburgers”
2023-02-24 - 2023-06-18 | Spira Central Gallery in memory of Brenda Spira
November 9, 1938, marked the start of the November Pogroms, when violent antisemitic demonstrations broke out across Germany, Austria, and the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia. This exhibition will shed light on the events as exemplified within several Jewish families in Ladenburg, Germany. It gives a picture of the city’s residents and their relations to one another.
The exhibition was conceived by teachers and students at the Hochschule für Jüdische Studien (Center for Jewish Studies, Heidelberg) and the University of Heidelberg in cooperation with the Lobdengau Museum. The project was based on the information compiled by the working group “Jüdische Geschichte” (‘Jewish History’) established in 1983 in Ladenburg. This exhibit discusses the fate of several Ladenburg families within the broader historical context. The research for this exhibit helped to situate the fate of several Ladenburg families in the greater context of history, including the family of Houston survivors Lea Krell Weems and Ruth Krell Steinfeld. Ladenburg was the childhood home of survivors Lea and Ruth who survived by being smuggled out of Gurs by the French resistance group Œuvre de Secours aux Enfants (Children’s Aid Society) at the age of 8 and 7, respectively.
Reasearch and Funding provided by Hochschule für Jüdische Studien (Center for Jewish Studies, Heidelberg and the Lobdengau Museum.

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