A Portal to GwoZdziec
Jason Loik and Rick Brown. installing the Bimah under the painted ceiling at the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, 2013.
Project Description
It is hard to believe that ten years have already passed since the installation of the Gwoździec Synagogue Reconstruction. This landmark project offered Handshouse Studio the opportunity to bring together more than 350 participants to take part in accurately reconstructing the 17th century wooden synagogue timber roof structure and painted ceiling that is now on permanent display in the core exhibition of the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw, Poland.
We are so grateful to mark this anniversary with a significant new effort to make decades of historic research more accessible to the general public.
With the support of a Mass Humanities Grant, which receives support from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and is an affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities, Handshouse Studio will create a website to house the Gwoździec Synagogue Project Interactive Archive/ Virtual Tour. The tour will start with a foundation of the gorgeous 3-D digital rendering of the Gwoździec Synagogue roof and ceiling that was made by Trillium Studio’s using Cary Wolinksy’s photographs in collaboration with the animation team of Crazybridge Studios. We will establish the initial phase of our virtual tour of the polychrome painted ceiling with a fly-through that gives viewers the opportunity to experience the complex imagery and architecture of the Gwoździec painted ceiling with both the intimacy of close up details, as well as a critical sense of each images context of the architectural painting as a whole. We will also use this virtual tour as an digital portal to an interactive archive of archival and material research related to Gwoździec Synagogue and other 17th century wooden synagogues of the Polish Lithuantian Commonwealth.
Through our partnership with the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw, Poland, we hope that this archive will eventually offer both institutions the forum to expand and deepen the contextual resources about 17th century wooden synagogues with contributions from other notable historians, architects, scholars, craftspeople, and project participants. And it will offer Handshouse Studio a new tool to share our unique hands-on process of illuminating this history with a wider public.
There is a lot of interest for new models of education like the kind of interdisciplinary, hands-on approach embodied by Handshouse projects; projects that meet the hunger for STEAM curricula, arts-integrated project-based learning, and can offer innovative culturally inclusive approaches to teaching both histories of systemic oppression and stories of the remarkable cultural contributions made by oppressed communities, all while inspiring empathy and cultural understanding of self and others.
Through the MAKING/HISTORy: Wooden Synagogue Project, Handshouse Studio has produced a priceless archive of historical material research that is vital to the continued work of recovering lost heritage. We have also established a powerful educational model for learning. The demand for our research and access to our unique hands-on approach of the Gwoździec Synagogue Project-- as well as the many other Handshouse projects-- is leading us to explore new ways to expand our capacity to share our process and resources. We imagine that creating this digital archive will serve as an exciting new model for how we reach our participants with all our projects.
After years of successful workshops with college students at the national/international level, we are eager to be adapting our unique hands-on pedagogy for more kinds of learners. One key tool for making our projects more accessible will be creating tools like A Portal to Gwoździec.
Krista Lima and Case Randall painting the southeast Pendentive of the Gwozdziec ceiling painting at the workshop at the New Synagogue in Gdansk, Poland in 2011.
Group painting the many elements in the Cove of the Gwozdzeic ceiling painting at the workshop at the White Synagogue in Sejny, Poland in 2012
Links to more information about the of Gwozdziec Synagogue
Gwozdziec Reconstruction Project workshop group with the East Dome, Coves and Lantern at the White Stork Synagogue in Wroclaw, Poland, 2012.
Follow Gwozdziec Synagogue Project in the Handshouse Journal
Handshouse Studio has created a new website; to begin exploring ways to create an interactive archive of living cultural heritage related to the Gwoździec Synagogue and other 17th century wooden synagogues of the Polish Lithuantian Commonwealth; launching a new chapter of the Wooden Synagogue Project.