Celebrated artist will visit NIU
for premiere of documentary on her work

by Tom Parisi

NIU will welcome internationally acclaimed artist Ruth Weisberg to campus later this month for a weeklong exhibit of her paintings, drawings and monotypes – and the Midwest premiere of a documentary on her life and work.

NIU communication Professor Laura Vazquez wrote, directed and produced the 40-minute documentary “Ruth Weisberg: On the Journey.” It won a gold medal in the 2003 Aurora Awards, an international independent film and video competition.

The video documentary will be screened at 7 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 26, at the NIU Visual Arts Building (Room 100), followed by a question-and-answer session with the artist and filmmaker. A reception for Weisberg will be held later that evening at Congregation Beth Shalom, 820 Russell Road.

More than a dozen of Weisberg’s artworks will be displayed from Feb. 22 through 28 in the Graduate Gallery (Room 214) of the Visual Arts Building. The exhibit and related events are free and open to the public.

The video documentary explores the breadth of Weisberg’s artistry, capturing her working in the studio and discussing her creative processes.

“When we walk into a gallery and view a work of art, it communicates in a certain way, telling us where to look,” Vazquez says. “In the documentary, I intervene. So I wanted to make sure that I did justice to Ruth’s art in a way that both explained it and extended the experience for the documentary viewer.”

For a portion of the documentary, Vazquez trains her lens on the artist’s commissioned work, “The Open Door Haggadah,” exploring Weisberg’s relationship to both Judaism and feminism.

After a national competition, the Central Conference of American Rabbis, representing the Reform Movement of Judaism, selected Weisberg to provide drawings for the new Haggadah – the book containing the story of the Exodus, which is read at the Passover Seder. Once every 30 years the Reform Movement updates its Haggadah, and Weisberg was the first female artist ever chosen to create the illustrations. Copies of the new Haggadah will be available for the artist to sign at the Graduate Gallery one hour in advance of the documentary screening.

The documentary follows the artist as she first photographs live models (including her grown son and daughter), thus placing contemporary people into the historical settings of her paintings and drawings. In this way, she uses the past to talk about the present.

“I wanted to capture the way in which Ruth crosses historical boundaries, taking us backward in history and forward in time,” Vazquez says. “She frequently pays homage to masterpieces of Western art in her works, thereby communicating the continuities in human history.”

Vazquez’s documentary places the Haggadah drawings in the context of other bodies of work by Weisberg. The documentary contains more than 150 of the artist’s images, which vary from room-size installations to intimate explorations of love and desire.

An accomplished filmmaker, Vazquez teaches media theory and production courses at NIU. She is currently working as cinematographer and editor for “Lincoln and the Black Hawk War,” a film directed by NIU Professor Jeff Chown for the Illinois Humanities Council. She also is co-directing a documentary on the NIU campus unrest of 1970.

Weisberg, a Chicago native, serves as dean of the School of Fine Arts at the University of Southern California. Her paintings, drawings and large-scale installations are featured in 60 major museum and university collections, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the French national library in Paris, the National Institute for Graphics in Rome, the Los Angeles County Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the National Gallery in Washington, D.C.

Weisberg’s visit to Illinois also will include a screening of the Vazquez documentary at 6 p.m. Wednesday, Feb. 25, in Room 203 of Columbia College, 623 S. Wabash, Chicago. The documentary also will be shown during an exhibit of Weisberg’s Haggadah work in March at Brandeis University in Massachusetts.

The DeKalb events are co-sponsored by Congregation Beth Shalom and the NIU School of Art, College of Visual and Performing Arts, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and Department of Communication.

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