Attributed to Willem Hendrik Rosier, Dutch (Amsterdam), 1707-1775, Pair of Torah Finials (Rimmonim), about 1765, silver and brass: cast, repoussé, chased, partially gilt, H 16 ½ in., Purchased with funds from Margaret and Douglas Abrams; Marion and Stanley Robboy; Connie C. and Robert D. Shertz; Laura and David Brody; Joan and Kalman Cohen; David C. Falk, Sr.; Elizabeth Kanof Levine and Ronald Levine, and other Friends of the Judaic Art Gallery, 2007 (2007.1/a-b)

One of the priority needs for the Judaic Art Collection has been Dutch synagogue silver of the 17^th and 18^th centuries. Superlative in craftsmanship, Dutch Judaica of this period testifies to the great flowering of Jewish cultural and intellectual life under the Protestant Dutch Republic.

This pair of ornamental finials (or rimmonim in Hebrew) was made by a leading Amsterdam silversmith for the Grote Synagoge (Great Synagogue), the principal house of worship of the city’s Ashkenazi Jewish community. The finials adorned the staves of a Torah scroll, the most important object in the synagogue.

The architectural form of these finials, reminiscent of a Baroque palace or church tower, is typical of Dutch rimmonim.  The obvious wear, including loss of bells, is not only the result of two centuries of use. The finials were looted by the Nazis who despoiled Dutch synagogues in World War II. Recovered after the war, the finials never returned to service. They were recently sold at auction by the Jewish Community of Amsterdam to raise funds for a new synagogue.

Old Kingdom, Dynasty VI, Reign of Pepy I or Merenre, False Door of Ni-ankh-Snefru (Called Fefi), about 2321-2278 B.C., white limestone with traces of paint, H 63 1/2 x w. 44 1/2 x d. 4 1/2 in., Purchased with funds from the North Carolina State Art Society (Robert F. Phifer Bequest) and funds from the bequest of Elsie M. Kramer, the bequest of W. R. Valentiner, and Mrs. William Gage Brady, by exchange, 2006 (2006.15)

Egyptian, False Door of Ni-ankh-Snefru

The false door was an important architectural element of private tombs because it served as a passageway for the ka (soul) of the deceased to travel between this world and the next. It was the centerpiece of the offering chapel, the accessible part of the tomb located above ground, where offerings were brought to the deceased. Carved in the shape of a door, including jambs, lintels, and even a rolled-up reed curtain above the doorway, it was inscribed with offering formulas and, more important, the name and titles of its owner. This monument belonged to the nobleman Ni-ankh-Snefru, nicknamed Fefi.

Fefi listed among his titles those of lector priest, one who recited sacred texts during religious rituals; Overseer of the Two Cool Rooms of the Great House (manager of the wine cellar and the food storage at the palace); and Overseer of the Pyramid Complex Men-nefer-Pepy, the burial place of King Pepy I located at Saqqara. Fefi was also a courtier of the royal house, and he took great pride in this fact, as it is mentioned six times in the inscriptions.

Fefi’s funerary arrangements would have included a contract with a ka priest, who would have been charged with bringing the daily food offerings. The bread and beer placed in front of the false door would sustain Fefi’s ka for all eternity. Family and friends were allowed to enter the chapel, provided they brought food and drink or recited offering formulas for Fefi’s benefit. Hieroglyphic inscriptions magically provided Fefi with offerings in case the priest or visitors failed to bring any.

Michal Rovner, Tfila

In Tfila, which translates from Hebrew as “prayer,” a hidden DVD player projects a video onto the surface of a rough stone tablet. The stone appears to be covered with a kind of calligraphic text or hieroglyphics. But upon closer inspection, one realizes that the small black characters are in constant motion and that the mysterious alphabet is actually a video projection of a miniature woman in a black robe dancing, bending, and dipping across the stone (the artist herself is the dancer). The endless repetition of the tiny figures, lined up in rows and columns, mimics text—a ledger of indecipherable symbols that provides an entirely new meaning for the term body language.

With no beginning or end, the video projection provides an enigmatic and mysterious narrative that is mesmerizing and hypnotic. Rovner’s works are sometimes interpreted as political commentary, especially in the context of her life in Israel, but she sees the works as very open-ended, without specific meanings or intended stories.

Dinh Q. Lê, Untitled

This work is part of a series by Dinh Q. Lê, From Vietnam to Hollywood, that interweaves black-and-white vintage photographs from Vietnam during the Vietnam War with color film stills from popular Hollywood movies about the Vietnam War. These shimmering, almost holographic photo-weavings present contradictory histories and different perspectives of the same event, exploring how context, experience, and memory impact our view of history.

The main image on the left is Martin Sheen as Captain Willard from the 1979 movie Apocalypse Now interwoven with the photograph of a young Vietnamese boy born after the war. To the right of the MGM logo is an image of a Playboy Bunny in a cowgirl costume from the same movie, woven with a studio portrait of a young Vietnamese woman that the artist believes was made in the 1970s. The images of parachutes are from documentary photographs taken during the war.

Devorah Sperber, After The Mona Lisa 2

Devorah Sperber’s multimedia works incorporate everyday materials—hundreds and thousands of spools of thread, pipe cleaners, colored tacks—to reinvent famous works of art. She is interested in exploring the reproduction of images in the digital era, the links between art and technology, and visual perception—how the eye and brain make sense of the visual world. Her process starts with scanning a reproduction of a painting to create a color-charted map, which she remakes in three-dimensions, using small objects to mimic the pixels of digital images.

In After The Mona Lisa 2, Sperber takes a detail from Leonardo da Vinci’s painting—probably the most recognizable and reproduced image in the history of art—and transforms it by inverting and enlarging it to an immense proportion (the original sixteenth-century painting is only 30 by 21 inches). Viewing the work through the sphere mimics peripheral vision, turning the image right side up and shrinking it to a recognizable size.

John Singleton Copley, Portrait of John Burgwin

John Singleton Copley left his native Boston in 1775 to pursue a more promising career in Britain. Even so, he continued to accept portrait commissions from visiting Americans, one of whom was John Burgwin of Wilmington, North Carolina.

The younger son of a Welsh gentleman, John Burgwin (1731–1803) was a self-made man. Without expectation of inheritance, he sought his fortune in Britain’s North American colonies. Arriving in the port city of Wilmington, Burgwin set about building a successful mercantile business with shipping interests extending to London, Amsterdam, and the Caribbean. Through his first marriage he acquired two Cape Fear River plantations. With rising social status came civic responsibilities, and Burgwin held a succession of high offices in the colonial administration, notably private secretary to the royal governor and clerk of the governor’s council. Suspected of Loyalist sympathies, Burgwin found reasons to remove to England and Europe during the War of Independence. He returned to North Carolina after the peace and reclaimed his property.

Copley presents Burgwin as a confident, forthright man of affairs, his hand grasping a quill pen dipped in ink and his arm resting on a business ledger. The man had reason to be proud. He had remarried the year before, and his young wife had just given birth to his first son.

One curious matter concerns the bold—too bold—inscription along the edge of the ledger: “State of North Carolina Public Accts.” Almost certainly it was added later, perhaps in the nineteenth century, to emphasize Burgwin’s record as a public servant or his loyalty to the state. If so, the facts were stretched: Burgwin never held any office under the state of North Carolina.

The painting descended in the Burgwin/Burgwyn family until it was donated to the Museum.

Daisy Youngblood, Mother and Child

A native of Asheville, North Carolina, Daisy Youngblood is a figurative sculptor whose major body of work has focused on the human form and the animal world. Her skillful depictions provide just enough physical information to capture the most profound and true characteristics of her subjects. Her sculptural shorthand results in works of art that have an ageless, archetypal quality.  

Youngblood’s small-scale sculpture, miniature in comparison to its real-life counterpart, resonates with a power and an emotion that go far beyond its physical size. Only sixteen inches tall, Mother and Child is a portrait saturated with a tremendous sense of loss and sorrow, fragility and tenderness. The feeling of vulnerability conveyed by the work is further emphasized by the mother’s fragmented body, which is cut off just below the knees and has a wooden stick in place of one arm. The unglazed, scorched clay used to form the figures adds to the air of tentativeness that emanates from this sculptural pair. But there is also a strong sense of resilience in the mother’s forthright stare and the power of love conveyed by the close connection of the child to the mother’s body, cradled in her arm and leaning on her chest.

In describing her inspiration for making this work, Daisy Youngblood has said, “I had seen a photograph of an Amazonian woman holding her child. Her world, her jungle, was being destroyed, but she stood there holding such life, standing firm in the presence of awesome fear and love.”