The Future of Rachel Marker: A Closing Program

Please join us for the closing of the exhibition Through the Eyes of Rachel Marker | A Literary Installation by Moira Roth.

For over ten years, writer and art historian Moira Roth has been creating a fragmented narrative about a fictional Czech Jew, Rachel Marker, a witness to 20th-century European history. Now for the first time, the project is presented in the form of a multi-media museum installation, curated by The Magnes Director, Alla Efimova.

During the run of the exhibition, visitors were encouraged to participate in the project by writing letters, reminiscences, and diary entries, reflecting on how historical traumas impacted their own lives. Some were penned in the gallery and displayed there, some took the form of private correspondence with Moira Roth. Many of these contributions were described in the exhibition’s blog.

The correspondence with John Farmer and his partner Mike Lý was particularly rich and extensive, taking up the subjects of the AIDS crisis and Vietnam War and opening up new directions for the literary project itself. Moira Roth, Alla Efimova and John Farmer will discuss the unfolding of the project since the exhibition’s opening as well as the future of the Rachel Marker narrative.

John Alan Farmer is an attorney and art historian. He first worked with Moira Roth while serving as senior editor at Art Journalin the late 1990s. She subsequently introduced him to Rachel Marker, and he has followed her remarkable life ever since.

Moira Roth, a writer and art historian, is the Trefethen Art History chair at Mills College, Oakland. She is a leading international voice in feminism, performance and contemporary art. Born in London in 1933, Roth has been, from childhood, deeply drawn to European history, culture and literature. She has also traveled widely, and often stayed in Berlin, Prague and Paris— the sites in which Through the Eyes of Rachel Marker takes place.