Danville Museum of Fine Arts and History

Leslie J. Klein is a mixed media and fiber artist from Parkland, Florida. She has

worked in pastels, oil pastels and mixed media, creating her images from a Jewish and

female perspective. She has had many one-person shows both in the U.S. and in

Israel, including “The Eden Trilogy”, an installation in oil pastel exhibited at the

Artist’s House in Jerusalem. Klein is also well known for her work in fabric —

painting, dying and constructing clothing, exhibition art work, and Judaic pieces

such as custom Challah covers and Tallitot.

As a fiber artist, Leslie Klein uses airbrush, paint brush, dyeing and discharging,

stencils, stamps, and screen prints in creating her complex cloth. Yarns, original

embroidery, stitchery, trims and found objects — both human-made and from nature

— is layered one upon the other to achieve her effects.

Each of the pieces in this exhibition - whether garment, wall hanging, soft

sculpture or construction - is a conceptual work of art. Elements of design and

images from the Holocaust, symbolic and meaningful, echo throughout the work:

abstracted concentration camp stripes, airbrushed with body parts, the yellow star

and Jude calligraphy, bricks from the ovens and ghetto walls, a tangle of eyeglasses.

But every piece also contains within it faith in Torah, pride in our people, and

stubborn resistance to oppression.

Artist’s Statement:

This series began for me in the remnants of Dachau.

The quiet pressed down around my ears. I couldn’t breathe,

afraid to talk too loud among the flat and empty rows of markers.

Perhaps it was the room with the ovens where whole chunks

of my consciousness began coming loose.

I don’t know the ghosts who visit themselves in my fabrics,

but they follow me nonetheless, showing up in garments to

instruct the way they are made and tell of their lives.

We Jews inhabit the past in order to fully understand our present.

I won’t move on without them.

We Didn't Know, We Didn't See    Resistance: The Grasshopper Corps   Ghetto Diary: Dreams of Zion     Messages on the Kindertransport        The Wall