Paulo Neuhaus & Shel Markel at the Amster Gallery

Now up at the Amster Gallery and Newman Lounge: Two Special Exhibits with Paulo Neuhaus and Shel Markel!

The Jewish Community Center is excited to welcome a series of artwork by a variety of talented visual artists! These beautiful pieces are on display and for sale in the Amster Gallery and Newman Lounge.

Featured in the Amster Gallery is the photography of Paulo Neuhaus. In honor of Native American Heritage Month in November, the Newman Lounge is featuring the Native American Leaders charcoal drawings of local artist Shel Markel.

Come check out the work of these two artists before the exhibit closes on December 8.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Paulo Neuhaus

Paulo’s portfolio reflects his strong interest in composition and color, though he occasionally shoots in the classic black and white mode. 

Born and raised in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Paulo was raised by Jewish parents who fled Germany soon after the onset of the Nazi regime. He earned a doctorate in economics at the University of Chicago in the 1970s, and after a brief professional stint back in Brazil, Paulo returned to the United States in 1979 as an economist in Washington, D.C.

“After years of shooting with a conventional single-lens reflex camera, I became interested in iPhone photography, drawn by its versatility and portability,” Paulo says. “I am also inspired by my extensive domestic and international travels, and visual stimulation from my living surroundings in Michigan and Virginia, where my wife and I spend part of the year.”

Paulo belongs to Middle Street Gallery, an art cooperative in Rappahannock County, Virginia, where he displays his work and participates periodically in solo and group shows.

Shel Markel

Since 1998, Shel’s work has been featured around Ann Arbor, the state of Michigan, the Midwest, and beyond, in both solo exhibitions and juried group shows. 

Shel’s art career began ten years before his retirement from a forty-year career as a medical doctor. Though he began his art career with still life work, his interests later turned to horses, portraiture, and figurative works. 

“My interest in Native American leaders began when I saw the cover of I Am a Man, the story of Standing Bear, who won his first famous trial by asserting that he was indeed a man and not something other than that,” Shel states. “This led to my seeing a collection of Edward S. Curtis’s famous photographs, and I was taken by the facial expressions of Native American leaders that showed much about what they had faced. I then gathered photographs of many of them and used them as references for the portraits that make up the exhibition. I coupled those with the historical events that the leaders were directly involved in and what things they said about themselves and their tribal brothers and sisters.”