As a political activist and attorney, I have always been interested in issues of social justice. My work visualizes the enormous human cost of gun violence in America, war and injustice.
- Deborah G. Nehmad, 2021
BIO
Deborah Gottheil Nehmad is a Honolulu-based artist whose works on paper have been seen in museum, non-profit and gallery venues since 1998. She was born and raised on Long Island in New York and graduated from Smith College with her B.A. in 1974. In 1982, she received her JD from Georgetown University. After years as a practicing attorney and working in politics (including the Carter White House), her legal work brought her to Hawaii in 1984. In 1985, an accident precipitated a series of life altering events. By 1998, she had earned her MFA in printmaking from the University of Hawaii – Manoa.
Nehmad has participated in numerous solo show and group exhibitions in Hawaii, on the "mainland", and internationally. Her work can be found in many public and private collections including the New York Museum of Modern Art, the Fine Art Museums of San Francisco, Yale University Art Gallery, the Davis Museum and Cultural Center at Wellesley College, Smith College Museum of Art, Hood Museum at Dartmouth College, the Hammer Museum of UCLA, the Honolulu Museum of Art and the Hawaii State Art Museum. She has received numerous awards, including purchases from funds provided by the Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation and was one of six Hawaii artists included in the Sixth Biennial of Hawaii Artists at The Contemporary Museum.. More recently, she was awarded the Hawaii State Foundation on Culture and the Arts Individual Artist Award for Excellence in the Visual Arts.
SELECTED REVIEWERS' COMMENTS
"Wasted" is not an optimistic installation, but neither is it didactic or polemic. Nehmad is concerned with data and information, but she is also dedicated to exploring the ritual power of art-making to pursue deeper connections and empathy. She denies us a comparative spatial layout or labels to help us understand how we might rank or assess this representation. And so we are left to explore and interpret this visceral map of the body politic on our own. It's worth finding out whether we're up to the challenge.
— David A.M. Goldberg,
Honolulu Star-Advertiser, 2016
In her current work Nehmad uses her method to step back and look more broadly at gun violence in America, trying to create a graphic representation that might affect the viewer more viscerally than graphs or statistics. Using handmade Nepalese paper Nehmad burns holes and makes stitches to represent individuals killed through the use of guns. Nehmad represents deaths by homicide, suicide as well as deaths caused by the police. The deaths of children due to gun violence (through homicide and suicide) are also graphically represented to differentiate them from other types of gun-related killings. . .
The show points to a problem right at the heart of contemporary American society. It's easier to attack and lash out than it is to view the other as a fellow human being worthy of respect and compassion. We teach malice and not compassion or understanding. In fact, it's more profitable when folks attack and lash out so these unnecessary deaths depicted in these pieces will undoubtedly continue for the foreseeable future. In this show guns become symbols of the absolute refusal to believe that it is possible to live like decent and compassionate human beings. The images show the effects of this refusal to even attempt to establish a humane ideology as the basis of our culture.
— Daniel Gauss,
Arte Fuse Magazine, 2015
If we accept that art is a tool for Deborah Gottheil Nehmad to represent her surroundings — even the interior ones — then I would argue that her work is everything but obsessive. To simplify an analysis, Nehmad's work stands at the crossing between two of the most influential art movements of the last decades: Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism. The first comes to mind readily; there is the pleasure of the material, the personal handling of the situation, and the interest in communicating experience. Then there is also the purpose, the arbitrary conception, and the repetitive execution.
As a means to portray her world — the world, life — it comes as no surprise that her work would be named after an affliction, as indeed, it has so much to do with pain. But since pain and death, the succession from one day to the next, and everything else we know, are life itself, one feels that calling Nehmad's work obsessive unmasks an inability to recognize our humanity.