Interviews From Yale Radio / Artists, Curators And More

In 2021, Anna Berlin was awarded a Fulbright Research and Study Scholarship to Berlin, Germany, and has since painted between her new home and her family’s house in New Jersey. The paintings weave Berlin’s life with the stories she grew up with about her family, alongside new understanding gained from independent research on her German-Jewish history. The paintings are of a grayscale world, where documentation, legal papers, and everyday ephemera become part of her language of storytelling. The works in Sisters use the monotone language of the bureaucratic documents she relied on in the first year abroad, such as tax forms, proofs of identity, and lists. The visual-verbal governmental speech was sometimes fraught with confusion as she shares her last name with the city, creating reverberations in the artist’s imagination of past and present, person and place, self and family, family history and cultural history. In exploring her new home, the artist accessed a deeper connection to her family’s past in Germany