A recent GoFundMe succesful campaign to safeguard what could be saved.
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Aribert Munzner’s Website
What is left undone one minute, is restored by no eternity. – Frederich Schiller
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Aribert Munzner’s Website
What is left undone one minute, is restored by no eternity. – Frederich Schiller
Genesis, Mural, 2009 – 5’x8′ – Acrylic on canvas – 2009
After seventy years of being thoroughly engaged in his studio, following a recent disastrous fire, Aribert (Ari) Munzner is at age ninety ready to start over (cf. his interview in The Forward).
As his quiet and precise passion over the many decades can attest to, his own history is dramatically vertiginous – three times he escaped with very little:
As his quiet and precise passion over the many decades can attest to, his own history is dramatically vertiginous – three times he escaped with very little:
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at age seven from Nazi Germany.
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a few years later, having found refuge in Baghdad, just before the Farhud (pogrom) of 1941.
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and now again, after the George Floyd protests in Minneapolis, when seventy years worth of (500) works were practically destroyed.
He is that indefatigable artist who until very recently could be found every night in his studio working on the Genesis series he had started in the mid-fifties.
Far from the ever-changing trends, Ari has been Ari, faithful to his goal to weave art and science, macro and micro multiverses, and even that “angelic dum-da-da-dum-dum” (as per that Forward article) – and to explore whatever “genesis” may lead you to, whether you consider each moment, being alive, creativity, the Big Bang, Quantum physics, the Sephirot, the Chakras, you name it…
It is probably not an accident that this master-of-renewal-in-times-of-crisis was friends with the leader of Jewish Renewal, Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi.
The trouble is, as I see it, that too many times, people are “discovered” too late to interact with them directly.
After a triple bypass surgery, Ari Munzner is at age ninety still a living treasure: it is high time we pay attention to him and his work.
Obvious candidates seem to be The Drawing Center, the NYC Jewish Museum and other museums in New York, Paris, Berlin.
Anyone with a connection with Moment Magazine?
It is probably not an accident that this master-of-renewal-in-times-of-crisis was friends with the leader of Jewish Renewal, Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi.
The trouble is, as I see it, that too many times, people are “discovered” too late to interact with them directly.
After a triple bypass surgery, Ari Munzner is at age ninety still a living treasure: it is high time we pay attention to him and his work.
Obvious candidates seem to be The Drawing Center, the NYC Jewish Museum and other museums in New York, Paris, Berlin.
Anyone with a connection with Moment Magazine?
ADDENUM (UPDATE):
Good news: after that first article by PJ Grisar from The Forward (cf. above or here: interview, I was also able to get Noah Phillips from Moment Magazine to fly to Mpls to interview Ari in a line of towering figures (as “role models”)!
Sad news: The wonderful video piece about Ari by Raven R. Miller, that I had originally posted below, has disappeared from his Vimeo account.
Please help out if you have any contact information on how to make this happen.
Someone mentioned to me that Ari may be one of the Lamed Vovniks – the so-called hidden 36 sages of each generation. — I leave that up to you but anyone who spends time with Ari witnesses one of the kindest (and liveliest) people!
[FYI: Aribert Munzner was the Dean of Faculty when, thirty five years ago, I spent one year as a Visiting Artist at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. PM]
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