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Noah Breuer: Reclamation

Noah Breuer, who is a contemporary printmaker and professor of print media at the University at Buffalo, NY is celebrating his first museum exhibition at the National Czech & Slovak Museum, a Smithsonian Affiliate, in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Breuer's work recovers a small portion of the lost heritage of his family, who owned textile factories in Czechoslovakia and Austria in the early 20th Century. The factory was seized by the Nazis in the late 1930s and most of the family perished in the Holocaust, with the exception of his grandfather. In 2016, Breuer returned to the Czech Republic on a research grant and uncovered several boxes of textile samples from his family's factory at the Czech Textile Museum in Česká Skalice, as well as the company’s business records in state archives in Zámrsk and in Dvůr Králové nad Labem.

Based on this group of original materials, the artist has generated a large body of work in screen printing, paper pulp (at Dieu Donne), and glassmaking techniques, reinterpreting the source imagery for contemporary viewers. As noted in Hanley's essay, "Through digital manipulation of his source imagery, Breuer explores the full spectrum: from the playfulness of their original historical context to the complications that attend modern-day reception of these images."
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