whose eyes i have
An Interdisciplinary Family Installation
Leah Sobsey Linda Belans Adam Sobsey
February 14 - March 4, 2023
Reception: Wednesday, February 22nd | 6-8PM
About whose eyes i have
For more than two decades Linda Belans, her daughter Leah Sobsey, and her son Adam Sobsey have been independently exploring family history through their respective disciplines: Belans, dancer/writer/poet; Leah Sobsey, imagemaker and Associate Professor of Photography, UNC-Greensboro; Adam Sobsey, writer and playwright. This exploration first culminated in an installation by Linda and Leah in 2016.
For whose eyes i have, the three family members draw on archival and personal histories of their maternal and paternal roots in Ukraine, Russia, Romania, and the United States. Through their respective disciplines and family traditions of photography, video, dance, music, and narrative storytelling, they create an immersive installation that explores migration and travel, heritage and identity, and both the power and the weight of what is passed down to us by our forebears.
More About the Artists
Linda Belans is a dancer, writer, poet, author, and activist. She has performed with Ronald K. Brown/EVIDENCE, Li Chiao-Ping Dance, and the Big Red Dance Project. Internationally renowned choreographer/performer/director Doug Varone made Murmurs for her 71st birthday which she has performed in Durham, North Carolina, New York, and other cities around the US. She is part of the ensemble in My Body Is My Own, Planned Parenthood and Glamour Magazine’s national campaign. Belans currently studies dance with revered American Dance Festival faculty member Gerri Houlihan, and has studied poetry with the acclaimed poet Naomi Shihab Nye. Belans directed the American Dance Festival’s International Critics Conferences and was the dance critic for the Raleigh News & Observer for 30+ years. She is the founding host of The State of Things on public radio, and the author of States of Being: Leadership Coaching For Equitable Schools. Over the course of her 77 years, she has received numerous awards across multiple arenas including a Bogliasco Fellowship in dance. She has been Writer-in-Residence at Weymouth Center for the Arts & Humanities and Wildacres. She is a four-time Distinguished Writer honoree by ArtAscent Art & Literature Journal, has received two Gracie Awards for Women in Media, and a Silver Reel Award for Broadcast Journalism. She holds a doctorate in Educational Leadership.
Adam Sobsey is a multidisciplinary writer. He is the author of Chrissie Hynde: A Musical Biography (Univ. of Texas Press 2017) and the lead writer of the baseball book Bull City Summer (Daylight Books 2014). He has published in The Paris Review, Grantland, and many other magazines and periodicals, and has been a staff writer for Baseball Prospectus and The Independent Weekly. He is currently a staff writer for the music website Pop Matters and will soon join the literary magazine Hobart Pulp as a contributing editor. His plays have been staged in New York, California, Texas, and North Carolina. He is the recipient of a North Carolina Arts Council Artists Fellowship, as well as numerous awards nationwide as both a journalist and a playwright. He has taught at Duke University and Elon University. He received his MFA from the Michener Center for Writers.
Leah Sobsey is an imagemaker, Associate Professor of Photography, curator and Director of the Gatewood Gallery at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. Sobsey’s multidisciplinary photographic practice reaches into the fields of science, design, installation, and textile. Often partnering with scientists, her photo-based work explores the natural world through archives and taxonomies with an experimental and materials-based approach to the medium of photography to explore the impacts of climate change and species loss. Her current exhibition, In Search of Thoreau’s Flowers, documents species loss through Henry David Thoreau’s herbarium, open through 2023 at The Harvard Museum of Natural History. Her images have appeared in numerous publications including New Yorker.com, the Paris Review Daily, Slate.com, Hyperallergic.com, and The Telegraph. Her monograph, Collections, was released in July 2016 by Daylight Books. Sobsey is currently at work on her next book, This Earthen Door, in collaboration with artist Amanda Marchand.
Credits
Selected images: sourced from Herbert Belans (b. Abraham Belansky, 1910, d. 2000), and from uncredited family photographs. Belans, a self-taught photographer and engineer, is Linda Belans’s father and the maternal grandfather of Adam and Leah Sobsey.
Cantorial music: composed and performed by Pinchas Jassinowsky (b. Romanovka, Ukraine, 1886, d. New York City ,1954). Jassinowsky, Cantor of the Jewish Center synagogue in New York from 1920-1954, is Adam and Leah Sobsey’s paternal great-grandfather.
Murmurs choreography: Doug Varone, internationally renowned/award-winning choreographer and director. Varone originally choreographed Murmurs for Belans’s live performance that debuted at the 2016 installation.
Murmurs video: Murmurs is presented for whose eyes i have in collaboration with Raquel Salvatella de Prada, who focuses on integrating video and animation with different traditional art forms and is Associate Professor of the Practice at Duke University, and video artist Shirin Maleki.
Murmurs score: Chion’s Cricket, from the album UrbanScapes In A Temperate RainForest, by multimedia artist Jim Lee whose work draws on sound, artifacts, and remains of natural materials.
Aquarium installation: Text excerpted from Adam Sobsey’s forthcoming book A Jew by the Roots.
Bench: Luigi Crovetto is an intaglio artist whose work can be found in numerous private and public collections. Since 2006, he has been maintaining the extraordinary Bogliasco Villa dei Pini garden.
Sponsorship and Programming Opportunities
This project is made possible, in part, by an Ella Fountain Pratt Emerging Artists Grant from the Durham Arts Council
whose eyes i have offers opportunities to university departments and independent funders to support, sponsor, and/or create wraparound programming in the fields of Jewish studies, the humanities, writing, history, visual and performing arts, anthropology, and sociology.
