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The Smithsonian's Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden has loaned four paintings by renowned American artist Ben Shahn to the newly-opened exhibition, “Drawing On The Left: Ben Shahn and the Art of Human Rights,” which will be on view at the Duke Hall Gallery of Fine Art through April 5. This is the first time that the Smithsonian Institution has lent artworks to JMU's art galleries.

Born into a Lithuanian-Jewish family, Ben Shahn (1898-1969) stands among the most prominent of the socially engaged American artists of his generation. As a progressive activist, he devoted his life's work to fighting injustice and promoting the rights of marginalized and persecuted people. This exhibition features major paintings, prints, drawings, photographs from the New Deal through the civil rights era that focus on issues of poverty, unemployment, fascism, war, labor unions, the nuclear arms race, civil liberties, and racial, ethnic and class discrimination. In short, Shahn stimulated the social conscience of a wide-ranging audience with art that is still powerfully relevant today. 

Dr. Laura Katzman, curator of the exhibition and a professor of art history at JMU, said that the exhibition was built around two major gifts of Shahn's art to the Madison Art Collection. One is from Michael Berg, a private collector and lawyer in Fairfax Station, Virginia, who was interested in donating works from his impressive Shahn collection to an institution that would use the work in its curriculum. The other is from the Ben Shahn Estate in Roosevelt, New Jersey

Katzman said, “The story of these gifts has a lot to do with a 28 year relationship I have built with the Ben Shahn family, which began with my dissertation research and has continued to this day. The family, like Michael Berg, wanted to find a teaching museum for their donation, a place where faculty would use the art as a teaching tool, a place where students would be able to work with the art in their classes, internships, and special research projects. Both donors were impressed by JMU’s focus on student-faculty research collaborations and on engaged learning.”

Drawing on the Left is sponsored by the College of Visual and Performing Arts’ Cultural Connection Program, the Encore Series, Michael Berg, the School of Art, Design and Art History, the Madison Art Collection, the College of Arts and Letters, the Office of Faculty Access and Inclusion, University Programs, the General Education Program, the Gandhi Center for Global Nonviolence, the justice studies and history departments, and the Center for the Interdisciplinary Study of Terrorism and Peace.

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