See for yourself, Marfa Lights viewing center, west of Marfa
Fort Russell in Marfa, TX
Ball room at Fort Russell, Marfa, TX
Her Uncle Dan Blocker from "Hoss", Bonanza TV show fame
Attacking railroad gates, no one knows when it will happen next
Prada Marfa in Valentine, Tx which is west of town
Back to Marfa on our way to Arizona for Christmas. We stayed at me friendly bed and breakfast, with Mrs. Mona atARCON INN in Marfa at 215 North Austin, 432-729-4826.
She gave my family access to Fort D. A. Russell and the beautiful murals painted by the war criminals of WWII, Robert Hampel and Hans Jurgen Press in 1945 (that were captured in North Africa by Patton). What became of these painters/soldiers after the war was over? We had lunch at the Food Shark again, and drove out to Prada Marfa and window shop for shoes. I guess.
MARFA – For the past eight months, Aureliano “Yano” Saul
Rivera-Lerman has been working to restore murals painted by German
prisoners of war detained at Fort D.A. Russelll during World War II.
The murals are on walls at was once the officer’s club for United
States soldiers stationed at Marfa. The structure is now called Building
98, home of the International Woman’s Foundation.
Mona Blocker Garcia and her husband Rodolfo “Rudy” Garcia bought the
deteriorating building in 2001 and have since given it new life and have
handed it over to the International Woman’s Foundation, whose board of
directors Mona Garcia sits on. The building was put on the National
Register of Historic Places by the National Park Service in 2004 and was
designated a historic site by the Texas Historical Commission in 2005.
“I’m really proud of that,” Mona Garcia said of the building’s
national and state historic designations. “Had I not bought that
building, it would have fallen down.”
According to the foundation’s literature, 185 German soldiers from
General Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps were housed at Fort D.A. Russell.
Two of those POWs, Hans Jurgen Press and Robert Hampel, are the artists
who painted the floor to ceiling murals in Building 98’s gala dining
room and library.
(ALBERTO TOMAS HALPERN) Aureliano “Yano” Saul Rivera-Lerman and
the murals
Yano, the fedora-wearing artist, came to Marfa like many others
before him, through the Chinati Foundation’s internship program.
Originally from San Juan, Puerto Rico, Yano split his time between San
Juan and the San Francisco Bay area.
He studied art at the University of California, Santa Cruz and spent
an additional two years studying art history and chemistry at the
University of California, Berkeley.
While at Chinati, Yano worked with Conservator Bettina Landgrebe on
restoring Donald Judd’s 15 concrete works on the foundation’s grounds.
After his internship ended, Yano had intentions of sticking around
Marfa. “There was just a window of opportunity,” Yano explained of how
he ended up living and working at Building 98. He met Mona Garcia at
Planet Marfa and struck up a conversation. “I went up to Mona and said
I’d like to stay in Marfa and can I have a crack at restoring your
murals. She took my resume, took it to her board, the board said yes and
I’ve been here ever since,” Yano said.
Speaking to the condition of the murals, Yano said, “They were in
need (of conservation). The mural was flaking off the wall and falling
apart rapidly. Mona needed some people to do it. I showed up and I said
I’ll do it for peanuts. I’m doing it for room and board.” Yano has been
working alone for the past eight months on the project.
“It’s massive in my mind,” Yano said of the scope of the restoration,
“It’s enormous. I came into the room and I saw the condition of the
mural and I started crying and I started freaking out. I got down on my
knees, I closed my eyes and the stress began,” he said tongue-in-cheek.
Mona Garcia verified this. “It scared him, but he’s done such a
wonderful job. He’s very intelligent and intuitive,” she said.
Rather than employing difficult restoration techniques, which made
Yano a bit uneasy considering the history behind the murals and the
ramifications of damaging the wall paintings, he instead pursued a
simpler approach.
“I chickened out. It’s like doing surgery,” he said of complicated conservation methods, “It’s daunting.”
Instead, “All I did was very basic. I consolidated the mural’s paint.
It was flaking and cracking like a giant exfoliating snakeskin. I went
in with a tiny brush and painted conservator’s grade glue over the
surface of the cracks and hit it with a heat gun and tacked it down with
an iron and a piece of Mylar,” Yano said of his procedure. “I stopped
it from falling apart. I swear to God it was falling apart.”
As part of the restoration, Yano had to fill in missing gaps in the
murals, a victim of water damage. “I’ve repainted all of the missing
parts,” he said, though he had no photographs of the original mural to
go off of. “It was just me, my artistic interpretation,” he said of
painting missing parts of the mural.
“Mostly it’s just a repeating pattern. There was a landscape where I had to invent. It’s intuitive guessing.”
Working on the mural restoration has not only been a means to perfect
his craft, it has also been an enlightening experience that has
questioned his morals, ethics, and beliefs. Yano, who is Jewish,
discussed his feelings on restoring paintings by World War II German
prisoners of war.
“It matters because I’m Jewish. My instinct is always to bring up the
Holocaust in some way. I recognize that in American prison camps,
prisoners were painting murals. In German prison camps (during the war),
people were being mass murdered. I have family who survived the
Holocaust. There’s a knee jerk reaction to say German soldiers during
World War II equals Nazi. That’s knee jerk, even though it isn’t true.
The guys who were here pretty much weren’t Nazis,” he explained, saying
the German Afrika Korps soldiers, as a whole weren’t convicted of war
crimes.
“These guys were not in Poland committing genocide. They weren’t
shooting grandmas in the forest. They weren’t at all connected to the
death camps.”
The emotions evoked by the mural restoration spurred an idea for an
art installation for Yano, which will take place July 24 in Building 98.
“This is my personal installation. My working title is Magneto After Therapy aka My Sympathy for the Germans.”
Magneto, yes, the X-Men comic book villain, is a character that Yano
identifies with to a certain degree, or at the very least sees some
similarities.
“My gut reaction is when I think German from World War II I think
Nazi. I’m guilty of that hasty generalization. It’s not totally fair.
Magneto’s generalization is that human equals Nazi because Magneto grew
up in Auschwitz and the Nazis did experiments on him. Being Jewish,
working on this murals painted by German prisons of war from World War
II, I’ve had to come to terms with that. Maybe that gut reaction isn’t
quite so.”
Yano explained that his coming to terms with his beliefs over the
course of working on the murals is something that Magneto could possibly
do towards humans. Channeling his feelings through Magneto, Yano is,
“Envisioning for this installation Magneto coming to terms with his
hatred with all humans. I’m afraid I’m at risk of kitschifying the
Holocaust. It’s not about the Holocaust it’s about logic.”
“Originally I had this plan of doing an image of Magneto destroying
the murals. He’s angry at the Holocaust, angry at humans, and he comes
into the room thought the landscape, sets the landscape on fire and
destroys the walls and leaves the room totally empty. Then I thought to
myself, that’s a little angry.
Magneto is me, I am Magneto,” he said, laughing uncontrollably at the last part.
Those who will view his installation will see an image of Yano
dressed as Magneto projected on wall talking about how his behavior is a
result of unresolved trauma after seeking therapy. It’s about
possessing trauma. “I’m going to try and enter Magneto’s consciousness
and see how he healed and no longer generalizes about humans and Nazis.”
(ALBERTO TOMAS HALPERN) Aureliano “Yano” Saul Rivera-Lerman and the murals
