Tamar Segev is GlogauAIR resident
from January, 2023 to March, 2023
Tamar Segev is a visual artist living in Urbana, IL. She received her BA in Studio Art from Carleton College and her MFA from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her work explores connections between familial memory, historical narratives, and contemporary culture, as they are embedded in specific sites and surfaces of architecture. She paints, draws, and stitches as an embodied act of remembrance, an effort to penetrate, inscribe, and process memory.
Meet the Artist
What’s your name and where you come from?
Tamar Segev from Boston, Massachusetts (U.S.A)
How did your artist journey begin?
I’ve been drawing for as long as I can remember. I took art classes growing up at a local museum and became pretty serious about art in high school. I majored in studio art in college and finished my MFA in 2021.
Do you find inspiration in real-life situations and moments you experienced?
I am inspired by places I visit and my experience of the landscape and architecture of a city. I take a lot of pictures to remember specific features of a place, but I also work from my memory of the site — the colors, the light, and the lasting feeling of a place.
What is your process? What are your overarching themes in your artwork?
I am interested in how memory is embedded within a city’s built environment. In
Berlin, I have been visiting many memorials. Recently, I began taking walks looking at Stolpersteine, commemorative plaques in front of the last known residence of victims of National Socialism. I record the walks through an app on my phone and then trace the line onto paper. This becomes the basis for my abstracted paintings. I also take photos at each site. I use these photos as a guide when I work over the initial line with oil pastel and watercolor. After these relatively quick first layers, I add thread to the paintings. In these works and my previous body of work, I use stitching as a way to drastically slow down my process and reference a history of textile work in my family.
Do you think your art has evolved being in a different environment E.g. Do
you think GlogauAIR / being in Berlin has influenced your work?
Absolutely. I am clearly influenced by the history and architecture of Berlin and could not make this work in a different location. I also love the light that comes through my large windows at GlogauAIR and am influenced by the colors I see outside when I am working. My use of materials has also expanded at GlogauAIR. I set some material constraints for myself when I arrived due to the space and transportation needs. I decided to use water-based paints and drawings materials on a small scale, instead of my usual oil paint on large canvases. While these material choices began out of practical concerns, they have opened so many new and exciting material possibilities in my work that lend well to the content I am exploring. For example, I am really excited about how the thread interacts with rigid paper, as opposed to fabric, and the presence it has on a small scale.
Statement
My work explores connections between familial memory, historical narratives, and contemporary culture, as they are embedded in specific sites and surfaces of architecture. I paint, draw, and stitch as an embodied act of remembrance, an effort to penetrate, inscribe, and process memory. My creative research foregrounds the importance of memory as a discursive, material practice, where active remembering ensures memory’s place in the present.
GlogauAIR Project
During my residency at GlogauAIR, I plan to create painted collages that respond to the architectural surfaces and landscapes I encounter in Germany. In 2020, I began a series of stitched paintings interpreting the site of the former Lodz Ghetto in Nazi-occupied Poland, where my grandmother lived from 1940-44. In Berlin, my goals are to expand this project by visiting official and unofficial sites of remembrance related to World War II and the Holocaust. I am interested in how the memory of WWII is embedded within the built environment of Berlin and other German cities that were devastated by Allied bombing.
Drawing, Painting, and Printmaking
CV Summary
Education
- 2021 MFA in Studio Art and certificate in Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Champaign, IL
- 2016 BA in Studio Art, Carleton College, Northfield, MN
Selected Exhibition History
- 2024 Leslie Starobin, Tamar Segev, and Ori Segev: Looming in the Shadows of Lodz, Turchin Center for the Visual Arts, Boone, Appalachian State University, NC (upcoming)
- 2022 Embodied-Remembrance (solo exhibition), McLean County Arts Center, Bloomington, IL
- 2022 Inscribing Memory (solo exhibition), Urbana City Hall, Urbana, IL
- 2021 Embodied-Remembrance (solo exhibition), Main Gallery, Memorial Union, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI
- 2021 Inscribing Memory (solo exhibition), Peoria Art Guild, Peoria, IL
- 2021 Abstracted Abstraction, St. Louis Artists’ Guild, Clayton, MO
- 2021 Studio MFA Thesis Exhibition, Krannert Art Museum, Champaign, IL
- 2020 Exhibition of Artists from USA, YAG/Garage, Online
- 2020 Tick Marks (solo exhibition), Murphy 500, Champaign, IL
- 2020 Prop The Door, The South Studios, Online
- 2019 Cross-section, MFA Exhibition Online, University of Montana, Online
- 2019 Drawing, Site: Brooklyn, Brooklyn, NY
- 2019 Objects who hold, Objects who let go, La Estación Gallery, Urbana, IL
- 2019 Figureworks, Ottawa, Canada
- 2019 Returning MFA Studio Exhibition, Link Gallery, Champaign, IL
- 2019 Light vs. Dark, Gallery 263, Cambridge, MA
Awards
- 2022 Naomi Anolic Early Career Jewish Artist Award, Anolic Family Awards
- 2018-19 Graduate College Block Grant Fellowship Award, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Champaign, IL
- 2016 Distinction on Senior Comprehensive Project (Thesis), Carleton College, Northfield, MN
- 2016 Ursula Hemingway Jepson Memorial Award in Art, Carleton College, Northfield, MN
Gallery
