FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CZECH MUSEUM CEREMONY FEATURES NASA COMMANDER PRESENTED WITH UNDERGROUND MAGAZINE ILLUSTRATION TO BRING INTO SPACE
HOUSTON, Sept. 27, 2017 – On Oct. 6, the Czech Center Museum Houston and Vedem Underground, which celebrates the longest-running underground magazine inside a Nazi camp, will present NASA commander Andrew Feustel with an illustration from the magazine that the astronaut will bring into space next year. The ceremony is part of the Czech Center’s programming for Vedem Underground’s exhibit VEDEM: THE UNDERGROUND MAGAZINE OF THE TEREZIN GHETTO, which will be on display until Nov. 30.
As part of the ceremony, Feustel, who has flown on two Space Shuttle missions and will launch to the International Space Station in March 2018, will speak about his decision to honor the magazine’s teenage creators, who were prisoners of Czechoslovakia’s Terezin Ghetto between 1942 and 1944. In addition to a cover illustration from the magazine Vedem depicting a rocket shooting out of a scroll towards Earth. Houston-based Feustel will also bring a drawing by Vedem editor Petr Ginz in tribute to both Ginz and to late Israeli astronaut Ilan Ramon.
“These children came together in the most dire circumstances, and continued to hope for the future of all humankind,” said Feustel, who has long felt a bond with Czech culture through his Czech wife. “Our missions are carried out for the betterment of humankind through space research and exploration.”
Called “the Dead Poets Society of Terezin” by Los Angeles’s Jewish Journal, VEDEM: THE UNDERGROUND MAGAZINE OF THE TEREZIN GHETTO is an art installation that deconstructs and reinterprets the literary work of the teenage Jewish creators of the longest-running underground magazine in a Nazi camp. Using a combination of pop-art graphics, archival photographs and cartoons, and the prose and poetry created by the magazine’s contributors, VEDEM: THE UNDERGROUND MAGAZINE OF THE TEREZIN GHETTO celebrates the artistic and cultural legacy of Vedem by breaking down its 83 weekly issues totaling the 800 pages, then reconstructing them in the form of a contemporary magazine.
The exhibit premiered at the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles in 2016, and has since been presented at museums in El Paso, Austin and Sacramento. It is scheduled to travel to at least ten additional U.S. locations, including San Antonio, Amarillo, Dallas, Milwaukee, Portland, Oregon, and St. Petersburg, Florida by 2019.
VEDEM: THE UNDERGROUND MAGAZINE OF THE TEREZIN GHETTO was produced and curated by Rina King, whose grandfather led the resistance at Lithuania’s Kovno Ghetto and who is also co-writing the companion book Vedem Underground: Pages of Resistance and producing the Vedem Underground documentary film with an Oscar- and Emmy- award winning team; Los Angeles-based art director Michael Murphy, who conceptualized the exhibit as a merging of punk subculture-inspired art and the 1940s-era ‘zine aesthetic; and Los Angeles-based writer and journalist Danny King, who is producing and co-writing the companion book.
WHAT: Czech Center Museum Houston and Vedem Underground Ceremony Featuring NASA Astronaut Andrew Feustel
WHERE: Czech Center Museum Houston, 4920 San Jacinto St., Houston, TX 77004, 713.528.2060, www.czechcenter.org
WHEN: Saturday, Oct. 6, 2017, 6:30 p.m.
CONTACT:
Rina King
Founder and Executive Director, Vedem Underground
323.397.6423
www.vedemunderground.com.
ABOUT VEDEM UNDERGROUND: Vedem Underground is a multimedia project that celebrates the courageous, heartbreaking and ultimately victorious legacy of Vedem (“In the Lead” in Czech), the longest-running underground magazine to be regularly produced by prisoners inside a Nazi concentration camp. The project teaches tolerance and encourages artistic activism through Vedem‘s historic and cultural lessons, and includes a museum exhibit, a documentary feature film, a companion book and a cutting edge educational program. The exhibit premiered in May 2016, the book will be completed in early 2018 and the film is slated for release by the end of 2018. The exhibit has been supported by the 2016 WORD Grant: The Bruce Geller Memorial Prize, a project of American Jewish University’s Institute for Jewish Creativity. The exhibit has also been generously supported by the Jewish Community Foundation of Los Angeles. Other support for the project comes from Steven Spielberg’s Righteous Persons Foundation and The Ziering Foundation.