PART II: FAMILIES IN PARADIse

the four jews

The families from left to right: Spong-Fernandez, Sacks, Pestrong, Attia

The families from left to right: Spong-Fernandez, Sacks, Pestrong, Attia

Think Round Fine Arts Press Release
October 2018


Everyone is invited to join Heidi Hardin, Rachel Leibman, and Jonathan Sacks for ArtSpan’s 2018 Open Studio and beyond, for this exaltation of art, culture, and family. A full program of Family Art Making Workshops, Artists and Family Talks, Guest Speakers, Interactive 3-D Digital Demonstrations, Performances, Jewish Immigration Story Telling, and much more, will accompany this exhibit on Saturdays, from 10-11:30AM, beginning October 14 through December 30. Additionally, Hardin will lead Guided Walk-Through Meditations every Sunday from 4-5PM, and School Tours and Art Activities on Friday afternoons from 1-2PM. Gabriela Hofmeyer, artist/volunteer will help facilitate Human Family Suppers (potlucks) and Salons on Tuesday evenings from 6-8PM. All classes, activities, and refreshments are free of charge.

Please visit: http://www.thinkround.org/events-1/#/our-artists/ for a full calendar of events. Think Round Fine Arts is located at 2140 Bush Street, Suite 1, San Francisco, CA 94115. For more information or to RSVP for classes, meditations and dinners, please call Heidi at (415) 602-9599 or email: heidi@heidihardin.com. Space is limited so please call now. Gallery hours are 9-noon, Tuesdays and Thursdays, and by appointment. The opening reception for Hardin, Liebman, and Sacks is on Saturday, October 6, from 4-8 pm, with Artists’ Talks at 6 pm.

Sixteen years in the making, Hardin premiers: Families in Paradise (The Four Jews), 78 portraits of four families of different ethnicities who have traveled to America to make their homes and a new life. This installation is Part II of Hardin’s extended project, The Human Family Tree/A Walk through Paradise…seven installations, otherwise known as Paradise…  Paradise… is an evocative multimedia meditation on the experiences we share, regardless of faith, culture, or ethnicity, and centers on families who are followers of seven major world religions. Each successive installation focuses on a single religion, presenting 78 freestanding portraits, along with touching objects, environmental displays, and an original soundtrack by Hardin’s longtime collaborator and fellow UCSD alumnus, Los Angeles composer, Jonathan Sacks.

Snapshots from family photo albums transcribed into genre paintings offer an unexpected window into the shared human experiences that bridge the personal and the universal. A labyrinth of footpaths and columns replicating the mythic Tree of Life creates a ‘walk through paradise’ among the paintings for viewers. On a symbolic level, these installations explore ideas about cultural self-definition, the pervasiveness of the American dream, the universality of, and new directions imagined for, the human family and their faiths. As human longevity extends dramatically in the coming decades, and broken heartstrings from family trauma through new trauma incident reduction modalities are able to be healed, Hardin, in this project, call for human beings to consciously decide to manifest heaven on earth, creating paradise here and now. This new vista urges forward Think Round Fine Arts’ nonprofit code of ethics: Earth is home. Humans are family.                                                                


the sacks family

the pestrong family

the attia family

the spong-fernandez family


artists’ talks


ARTISTs’ STATEMENTs

HEIDI HARDIN

Since 1999, I have been creating The Human Family Tree/A Walk Through Paradise…seven installations as a personal meditation on home and family, and as a way for me to heal the many broken heartstrings of my chaotic childhood being raised as one of seven kids by alcoholic and sex addicted parents. Disillusioned by the absence of the Christian values of the faith that I was baptized and confirmed into, I began to explore families practicing other faiths to see if and how they were teaching the distilled wisdom of their faith to their children. In this process, I became aware of the fears of people who are practicing various major world religions, like Buddhist, Hindus, Jews, and Muslims. Many were unwilling to participate in my project because they feared retaliation and hate crimes against them and their families. I also learned that even in the most seemingly progressive city in the world, San Francisco, Muslims are harassed on public buses and Jews are afraid “to be seen” because of a variety of complex, racial, political, and social fears related to their ethnicity and faith. I discovered that even in San Francisco, there are extreme biases within individual faiths against people of minority races or ethnicities.  These revelations of intolerance and the fears they engender are underlying the existence of daily life for millions of people practicing different faiths--a fact that seemed unbelievable to me until they were revealed in one-on-one interviews of prospective subject families of my project. 

Painting families of different ethnicities who are practicing the seven major world religions over the past twenty years has given me the courage, strength, and hope to face and accept the many traumatic events of my own childhood that left me with few memories of my childhood and teen years and kept me in a flight from reality. Now after, thirty years in recovery and decades of therapy of all types, I find that as the #MeToo movement breaks out on the national stage this morning with the allegations against Brett Kavanaugh by Julie Swetnick, a lovely woman who in her early teens while in public high school was cruelly drugged, then traumatically, brutally gang raped by young men of privilege and protection--I still feel burnt up by the many men in my life, including my dad, who, like Magritte, deny their abuses, deny their broken places, and hide behind the green, forbidden apple! (Please see my self-portrait below that directly speaks to this truth for myself.) [Trauma recovery research done by Kaiser Permanente and the CDC in 1992, correlates adverse childhood experiences (ACEs*) and its impact on human health across a lifetime. (Please visit Nadine Burke-Harris “TED Talk” about how childhood trauma affects health across a lifetime. Take the ACE test at: https://www.ncjfcj.org/sites/default/files/Finding%20Your%20ACE%20Score.pdf. If you have four or more ACEs and would like to seek help for free, confidential, peer-to-peer, non-medical, non-diagnosing recovery from ACEs or adult trauma, please call Heidi to enroll in our biannual health and wellness program, Turning the Tide of Trauma (TTT). Created and presented by Diana Canant of the Ardicare Foundation, TTT has transformed my trauma in ways so significant and profound, that I urge anyone with trauma to take this step toward manifesting heaven on Earth in your own life!]  

Just recently, Think Round, Inc. was accepted into the United Religions Initiative (URI) as a Cooperation Circle. URI Cooperation Circles give people of different backgrounds the opportunity to work together and tackling important community and global issues their members care about. Together, with the help of URI and its communities, we hope to manifest heaven on earth, which will require: the end of aging (or at least gaining the knowledge and belief that aging is a curable illness), the end of ACEs (Adverse Childhood Experiences), the end of the suppression of women and children by male dominated world religions, a paradigm shift in human belief systems from a fear model to a love model of living, and life-long intergenerational learning; however, we know our limits! We just hope that human beings can begin to consciously evolve spiritually by understanding and accepting their roles as deliberate creators, capable of and responsible for, creating heaven on earth, thereby earnestly living their lives on earth as they imagine it to be in heaven! Our plans for the future are to complete The Paradise Project and build the Center for the Human Family to house it and the several other objectives for programs and project to be implemented there that foster human spiritual evolution, conflict resolution, and sustainable living on the planet.                 

September 26, 2018

Rachel leibman

These collages tell stories about Jews living in the diaspora. Each piece provides a different narrative, some quotidian and some profound. Although life in the diaspora has often been difficult and cruel, it was important to me that Jews not be depicted only as victims. Jewish people have been proud and resilient, brilliant and common, challenging and generous. In short, beautifully human. So, my stories are of tailors and peddlers, rituals and journeys, scientists and musicians, persecution and resistance.

From an artistic point of view, composition is very important to me. I would like for viewers to be able to stand at a distance from my artwork and see something beautiful, exciting, interesting or pleasing. But the medium of collage affords the opportunity to provide an additional level of meaning. I have chosen source materials which further the narratives of the stories. As you get close to the pieces in this exhibit, you will see women scientists, Yiddish actors, partisan fighters, passports, visas, manuscripts, thimbles and thread.

I collected much of my materials from the Internet but also put out a call on social media for people to send me pictures of their loved-ones and ancestors. I received a treasure-trove of depictions of Jewish life around the world. In many of my collages I included photographs of people I know: My grandfather who came through Ellis Island, my in-laws as bride and groom, my friend David who fought in Vietnam, Maggy who was part of the Kindertransport, and my cousin Rob who is an awesome soccer goalie. I think that incorporating these personal materials helps to add relevance and intimacy.

My hope is that when you look at my artwork, you will in turn feel gratified, angry, proud and encouraged. I hope that some of my pieces will just make you laugh.

more about the composer

jonathan sacks

Originally from the Boston area, Mr. Sacks studied composition at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, with graduate studies completed at the University of California. His teachers included Kenneth Gaburo, Pauline Oliveros, and Pulitzer Prize winner, Roger Reynolds. He was awarded an Artist in Residence from the California Arts Council, and an HEW grant from the for the composition of three touring musicals. Mr. Sacks has won numerous composition competitions, including the Independent Composers Association and the Pacific Composer's Forum.

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His concert works  have  been  performed  in  New  York  and  Los Angeles by members of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, XTET, and the California Ear Unit. He is currently composer-in-residence for the Classical Theatre Lab. In addition, Mr. Sacks has composed incidental music for productions of "Hamlet", "Much Ado About Nothing", "Macbeth", and "Cymbeline", Chekhov's "The Three Sisters", Dickens' "A Christmas Carol", Brecht's "Mother Courage", Euripides' "Elektra" and Mark Medoff's new play "Stumps". He is currently at work with internationally-produced playwright Robert Auletta on a musical theater piece "Full Lunar Light".

As a member of The Contemporary Arts, Music, and Performance Alliance, he co-produced multi-media productions at the John Anson Ford Amphitheater as part of the L.A. County "Summer Nights at the Ford" series, the Ruth Bachofner Gallery, and Mount Saint Mary's College.

Jonathan Sacks is active in film music as arranger and orchestrator. Jonathan Sacks is active in film music as arranger and orchestrator. He has orchestrated film scores by Randy Newman, Michael Kamen, Mark Snow, Harry Gregson-Williams,Christopher Stone, and William Goldstein [including “Monsters, Inc.”, "Toy Story 2", "A Bug'sLife",  "The X-Files” (movie) and “Seabiscuit "]. Additionally he has been an arranger for the rock group KISS, for David Foster, Barbra Streisand, and for commercials.

Jonathan Sacks and Heidi Hardin have been friends and collaborators for the past twenty-five years creating performance artworks and installations including Stardust, Incantations: Book 1/Parsifal and Self Discipline, The Human Family Tree Project: Parts I, II, and III, Part III: Art of the Family will be on display at Think Round Fine Arts in San Francisco’s trendy Fillmore District in October, November, and December 2017.

Mr. Sacks is affiliated with BMI.


installation views
think round fine arts 2018

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