Emily Hass

Emily Hass is a Cambridge-born visual artist who lives in New York City.  Her artwork uses the archival architectural records of Berlin buildings where Jews and persecuted artists and intellectuals lived and worked in the 1930s. She began this series with her father's childhood home where he lived until 1938, when he and his immediate family escaped to London. With an emphasis on the Bauhaus Group, this series includes the former homes of Josef and Anni Albers; Johannes Itten; Otto Dix; Else Ury; Kurt Weill; Walter Benjamin; and Lyonel Feininger. The work is concerned with identity, place - and a culture's loss both of individual citizens and of a creative tradition.

Her collaboration with CoLab centers around a public art project she is developing with curator Beth Kantrowitz, a series of memorial murals of exiles who fled Germany to escape Nazi persecution. These murals, painted from her drawings based on blueprints that document staircases in the houses of displaced people, will be installed on the exterior walls of buildings in Berlin and the United States. The first mural, showing the stairs of Walter Gropius’ Berlin home, is to be installed in in Cambridge where he taught at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. 

Emily has been awarded grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the McCloy Fellowship in Art, and residencies at the Dora Maar House, the MacDowell Colony, and the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation. Selections from her series Altonaer Strasse were included in the 2011 Heimatkunde exhibition at the Jewish Museum Berlin and are now part of the museum’s permanent collection.  Her work has been reviewed in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, seen in the New York Times and featured in Der Tagesspiegel. Emily has graduate degrees in psychology and design from Harvard University.