Noah Breuer
Noah Breuer
Noah Breuer is an American artist and printmaker born and raised in Berkeley, California. Breuer’s current work examines the visual legacy of "Carl Breuer and Sons” (CB&S), his family’s former textile printing business, founded 1897 in Bohemia and lost in 1939 when it was seized and sold to Nazi collaborators.
Noah has had recent solo exhibitions at Left Field Gallery in San Luis Obispo, California; SPACE Gallery in Portland Maine; and Spudnik Press in Chicago, Illinois. His artist books have been published by the San Francisco Center for the Book, as well as, Small Editions in Brooklyn, New York. He has been included in numerous group exhibitions in galleries and museums including the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art and the Jule Collins Smith Museum at Auburn University. His work is in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, Watson Library at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum of Art and the Victoria & Albert Museum and numerous private collections.
Breuer is an Assistant Professor at Auburn University in Auburn, Alabama. He holds a BFA in Printmaking from the Rhode Island School of Design, and an MFA from Columbia University. He also earned a graduate research certificate in traditional woodblock printmaking and paper-making from Kyoto Seika University in Japan.
The relief prints included in this application are part of my on-going project which examines the visual legacy of "Carl Breuer and Sons” (CB&S), my family’s former textile printing business, founded 1897 in Bohemia. In 1939 the company, along with all other Jewish-owned property in German-occupied areas, was seized and sold to Nazi-approved owners, most of my family members were killed, and the product of their work was lost. Through my visits to the Breuer company’s archive of fabric samples and designs held at the Czech Textile Museum, I have amassed a rich digital collection of primary source material in the form of scans and photographs. My research opened a window to the material world of my lost European family and prompted me to create a tangible connection to the past through my artwork.
The the woodcuts I have submitted to this call each incorporate original CB&S textile patterns that I have manipulated through a digital design process, then laser-engraved onto birch plywood and printed on a Vandercook letterpress.
