Monday, October 31, 2011
Pedicord, Where Dad and Grandparents Stayed
In the 1930s my Dad, Philip Zarkin, and my grandparents, Harry and Rebecca Zarkin, stayed for a short time at the Pedicord Apartments in Spokane which has been enshrined in an exhibit at the Weismann Art Gallery on the University of Minnesota Campus. I don't have any details about their stay in this grim hotel but some of the interior has been reassembled in the museum. Soundtracks provide a haunting picture of desperate lives and I hope that is only the artist's interpretation. Weismann was the son of Russian immigrants to Minneapolis, much like my Dad who died in 2004.
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Your family has my sympathy. The artists were Ed and Nancy Kiezholz. Ed Kienholz was an installation/conceptual artist who emerged in the 1960s. I first encountered his work around 1970 through a documentary fim titled "Kienholz on Exhibit," which records people's reactions to a collection of his work, including his very controversial (at the time) "Back Seat Dodge at " (The film is on YouTube, but only 2 of 3 parts, unfortunately.)In 1973, I found "Pedicord Apartments at the LA County Museum of Art" and immediately recognized them as Kienholz. I never had to stay in such a place, I'm happy to say, but I saw such places when I delivered mail in downtown Hartford, CT. The Kienholzes were amazing artists to capture the essence of a part of life that many would choose to forget or ignore.
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