In going through boxes of vintage family  photographs at a local antique shop, I noticed that many did not have documentation or names of family members; formal group portraits from the “old country” in Eastern Europe showed the matriarch and patriarch sitting stiffly in the middle while other family members stared directly into the camera. In this contemporary mixed media family portrait of my father -in-law, Harry Rosefsky, and his wife and three children, I used Harry’s own saved photographs and ephemera to depict a new way of looking at a portrait of the important people in one’s life, to connect the past to the present, from one generation to another. Along with some of my other ephemera collage work, “Family Portrait” was included in the 2015 invitational show, “Appropriation Art: Finding Meaning in Found-Image Collage” at The Bascom Center for The Visual Arts in Highlands, NC.

Mixed media: ephemera-canceled checks, invoices, letters, stamps, photographs, gouache. 40″ x 60”