Samuel Bak, ‘Adam and Eve and The Sweat and the Pain,’ 2009, oil on canvas

Born in 1933 in Vilna, Poland, on the eve of the Second World War, Samuel Bak is a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust. In the nearly eight decades since the end of the war, Bak has established himself as a celebrated artist who uses his vibrant, often haunting yet hope-filled paintings as catalysts for conversations on identity, memory, and social change. This exhibition, Remembering Vilna, named for Bak’s birthplace, aims to shed eye-opening light not only on the childhood experiences that have shaped Bak’s life and art but also on the importance of reconstructing and retaining historical memory for future generations. Indeed, perhaps more than an artist, Bak can be considered an essential visual storyteller, using his paintings to examine Jewish experience of the Holocaust specifically — and the terrors humans can inflict on each other universally.