Facing the truth: Artist Daniel Heyman bears witness in show at Wesleyan

I've written about Daniel Heyman's artwork previously, specifically back in 2008 when some of Heyman's prints were included in a portraiture show at the Guilford Art Center. Heyman currently has a show at the Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery at Wesleyan University. I have a review of this show in this week's New Haven Advocate as well as on the Advocate's Web site:

What have we done? What terrible crimes were committed in our name whose perpetrators are not held to account? Some answers to these questions come in the form of a searing exhibition of portraits by Daniel Heyman, Bearing Witness: Stories from the Front Lines, currently on display at the Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery at Wesleyan University.

Heyman accompanied a team of human rights lawyers to Istanbul and Amman where they interviewed former Abu Ghraib detainees. Sitting in on dozens of interviews from 2005 to 2008, Heyman sketched and painted the former prisoners’ portraits while also scrawling text of their harrowing accounts into the images. The show also includes eight portraits of African-American men, primarily former felons now committed to being responsible members of the community. Additionally, two wood sculptures illustrated with black-and-white allegorical etchings critiquing our national disfigurement by war are installed in the gallery. The latter two works reminded me of Picasso’s “Guernica.”

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