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Autobiography and self-reflection on Jewish identity are recurring subjects of the works of Miriam Libicki, a third-generation American-Israeli comic artist. Drawing on a semi-structured interview with Libicki, this article explores how the concept of Jewish identity, both personal and collective, has influenced the artist's creative process throughout her career. Libicki's positionality as a third-generation artist is examined, alongside her oeuvre's place within the current trends of third-generation comics. Libicki's recent work on an SSHRC-funded Holocaust graphic novel project, A Kind of Resistance (2022), led her to undertake a more personal project which examines her grandmother's survival experience, Glasnost Kids (forthcoming). This most recent work on Holocaust narratives has brought Libicki closer to her own Jewish ancestry and has allowed her to further analyse and position her own Jewish identity within both historic and contemporary contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Jewish secOnd generation art & family Museum Amsterdam (JOMA) opened in 2022. It combines the artwork of Maarten van der Heijden with the stories of his Jewish family. This article presents the various stages of van der Heijden's work and elucidates his practice as a second-generation artist, drawing on the notions of postmemory and sublimation. The article concludes by discussing the JOMA as a highly personal as well as a collective memory project and its role in human rights education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on the influential concept of postmemory first mooted by Marianne Hirsch, and on the links between photography and mortality first explored by Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes, this article analyses the work of ten largely UK-based visual artists who, as members of the so-called second generation (namely, the descendants of Holocaust survivors and refugees), make use of the photographic medium to engage creatively and conceptually – and often in a conspicuously gendered way – with the legacy of their families' traumatic histories. Some of the artists (Halter, Tucker) base their handcrafted imagery directly on pre-war family photographs; others (Winckler, Brunstein, Petzal, Gorney, Kerr, Davidmann) incorporate actual photographs, past and present, into mixed media artworks, frequently manipulating and even doing violence to them. Others again (Garbasz) use photographs taken in the present to reach out to an inaccessible past, while yet others (Markiewicz) employ a more abstract and allusive approach to the medium. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This introduction explains the origins, aims and scope of this thematic issue on Displacement, Memory and the Visual Arts: Second-Generation (Jewish) Artists, which builds on a symposium held at the University of Leicester in May 2021. It offers a discussion of key perspectives on the notions of 'second generation' and 'postmemory' within the visual arts, followed by an overview of the contributions to the publication. The article then identifies and analyses a number of key threads and themes in the volume, including issues of belated memory, the uses by artists of archival images and documents, their engagement with space and embodiment, and the role of art in memory transmission. These discussions serve as a basis for an examination of how postmemory in the visual arts opens up possibilities for considering the relationships of second-generation artists to the past, and, more widely, revisiting contemporary understanding and remembrances of the Holocaust and its aftermath. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]