Mark Podwal

Projects and Installations

Beyond his works on paper, Podwal’s artistry has been employed in an array of diverse projects, including the design of a series of decorative plates for the Metropolitan Museum Of Art: Passover Plate, Zodiac Platter (Met Bestseller), and Life Cycle (Met Bestseller). His work has been animated for public television in A Passover Seder with Elie Wiesel (Time Warner), engraved on a Congressional Gold Medal presented by President Reagan to Elie Wiesel, and woven into an Aubusson tapestry that adorns the ark in the main sanctuary of Congregation Emanu-El of the City of New York. Moreover, he designed sixteen kiln cast glass panels for the United Jewish Appeal Federation Headquarters in New York. Podwal collaborated with Academy Award winning filmmaker Allan Miller on the documentary House of Life: The Old Jewish Cemetery in Prague, narrated by Claire Bloom. In 2009 and 2010, the film was broadcast on PBS. Podwal's portraits of Mozart in costumes from his operas were published as a boxed set of greeting cards by the Metropolitan Opera.

In conjunction with The Anti-Defamation League, Podwal began The Jerusalem Sky Project, a program that fosters tolerance and awareness by bringing together young children from the Jewish, Islamic, and Christian communities. Participating religious schools study Podwal's Jerusalem Sky in their classrooms, and then encourage their students to illustrate their own depictions of Jerusalem. Amidst the learning, the children of each school write to or meet with their counterparts at a school of another faith and begin to learn about each other's religion and culture. After a few weeks, the program culminates with an exhibition of all of the drawings from each of the schools. At the opening of the exhibition, the children meet to enjoy each other's art and company. In a 2005 article called "Three Faiths, One Lesson", The New York Times covered the completion of the program at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in Brooklyn, NY. The project has since also been carried out in Los Angeles, CA and Binghamton, NY.

In 2011, Podwal received commissions to illustrate a new Passover Haggadah for the Central Conference of American Rabbis Press; to design new embroidered textiles for Prague's seven-hundred-year-old Altneuschul; to create a limited edition print for The Metropolitan Opera's production of Nabucco; and to design Hanukkah cards for The Metropolitan Museum and The Metropolitan Opera. Also in 2011, he received the Jewish Cultural Achievement Award from the Foundation for Jewish Culture.

In 2014, at the Terezin Ghetto Museum there was an exhibition of Podwal’s cycle, All this has come upon us… The forty-two paintings and drawings, disturbing reminders of how Europe’s extensive history of "Jew-hatred" laid the groundwork for the Holocaust, have been published as archival pigment print portfolios. Portfolios have been acquired by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Library of Congress, Yad Vashem, the Bodleian Library, the British Library, Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, Yale University, Princeton University, Columbia University, Hebrew University, National Library of Israel, among many others.

In 2015, Mark Podwal was commissioned to design new textiles for the restored synagogue in the Czech city of Brno. At Prague's Klementinum, Podwal's series Mozart and Prague was exhibited along with Mozart's handwritten manuscripts.

In 2016, Glitterati Inc. published the 374 page monograph, "Reimagined: 45 Years of Jewish Art by Mark Podwal."

Affiliations

Podwal is represented by Forum Gallery, New York and has exhibited there since 1977. An archive of his works is located within the graphic arts collections at Princeton University Library, Princeton, NJ. He continues to pursue a parallel career as a physician and currently serves on the faculty of New York University School of Medicine as Clinical Associate Professor of Dermatology.