![]() ![]() And it is here that Burson's own work as a printmaker takes shape. The book as a whole pays tribute to these letters as an aesthetic form of coming to terms with the past. The very last letter of the three, from Burson's mother in Memphis to her mother in Riga, Latvia, was returned to sender, and it both ends the correspondence and raises the unanswerable question of what might have become of its intended receiver. Three letters translated here in their entirety, one each from Burson's mother, her grandmother, and her grandfather, written between October 1939 and August 1941, form the core of the book. Hidden in Plain Sight, a title Burson has used for the body of work that deals with these letters, which includes printmaking, sculpture, and now this artist's book, both offers access to the letters in an immediate way and presents them as an experience of discovery and loss that can never quite be fully comprehended. The letters, which were sent to Burson’s mother in Memphis, detail the efforts of Burson’s grandparents to leave first Germany, and then Latvia, before their deaths in 1941.įragments of these letters have appeared in Burson's work since 2009 as she has sought to make sense of her family history. In 1938, Burson’s grandparents, German Jews living in Leipzig, sent their two children, a boy and a girl (Burson’s mother), to the United States in an effort to protect them from the increasing restrictions on Jewish life and activity in Germany. When she had them translated, the letters opened a window onto the lives of her mother and grandparents, revealing the story of her grandparents' last years during the war and precious details of their daily lives that she had never known. The letters were written in German, a language that Burson does not read. The title of the book, Hidden in Plain Sight, refers to a group of over one hundred letters written by the artist’s grandparents to her mother between 19, which the artist found in 2009 in her family home where they had been stored for decades. The book takes up the very personal act of writing and, by extension, reading as its subject and in so doing becomes an exploration of the ambiguity and impermanence that is at the heart of communication itself as well as a singular attempt to commemorate and come to terms with loss. Bunny Burson's Hidden in Plain Sight deeply engages with a particular form of writing-the private correspondence exchanged between the artist's grandparents and her mother during World War II-while also enacting a form of storytelling in its own right.
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