User:Greavill/Jeffrey Schrier

Jeffrey Schrier (born December 7, 1943) is an American visual artist, sculptor and illustrator. His art uses discarded or recycled objects to create modern interpretations of ancient or traditional texts, with many of the works based on Jewish themes. Schrier's "Wings of Witness" project memorialized the victims of the Nazi holocaust with an installation of millions of soda-can tabs, collected by school-children, fashioned into an enormous pair of butterfly wings.

EDUCATION AND CAREER

Schrier was born in Cleveland and educated at the Cleveland Institute of Art and California Institute of the Arts. A faculty member at Parsons School of Design from 1981-91, he has also been a guest lecturer and artist in residence at Syracuse University and the State University of New York at Buffalo. Museums that have presented his work include the New-York Historical Society and the Cooper Hewitt in Manhattan, the [[New York State Museum[[ in Albany, New York, and the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York. In 1997, Schrier completed a holocaust memorial to honor Raoul Wallenberg, commissioned for installation at the Simon Wiesenthal Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles. Schrier illustrated two children's picture books: A Night of Questions, written by Rabbi Joy Levitt and Rabbi Michael Strassfeld, and his own text on the Jews of Ethiopia, On The Wings Of Eagles.

WINGS OF WITNESS

In 1996-97, students at Mahomet-Seymour Junior High in Mahomet, Illinois, collected eleven million tabs as part of a class project to represent the numbers of persons murdered in Nazi Germany during the holocaust. Schrier heard of the school project and utilized the five tons of the aluminum tabs collected by the students to create an art installation. Volunteers helped create "feathers" from the tabs, which were then laid out in a massive butterfly shape, a reference to a poem written by the young Czechoslovak poet Pavel Friedman, who perished at Auschwitz. Since its first installation at Mahomet-Seymour Junior High in 1998, Wings of Witness has been installed in several sites, including the Holocaust Museum Houston, and the Yeshiva University Museum in Manhattan.