ASL DrawNow! on Stéphane Mandelbaum

Video recording from January 28, 2024 of TDC's ASL DrawNow! online drawing workshop presented in American Sign Language (ASL) and inspired by the exhibition Stéphane Mandelbaum. The workshop was hosted by teaching artists Nic Annette Miller and Joyce Hom in ASL with no voice interpretation.

Stéphane Mandelbaum

Born in Brussels in 1961, Stéphane Mandelbaum (d. 1986) was the son of a Jewish father, painter Arié Mandelbaum, and an Armenian mother, illustrator Pili Mandelbaum. Tutored in drawing from an early age, Mandelbaum attended an alternative boarding school as a young boy to accommodate his severe dyslexia. Learning to write was difficult, and he soon turned to drawing as a more accessible means of expression, though the text in his drawings was frequently riddled with spelling errors, both intentional and unintentional. At fifteen, Mandelbaum began studying at the Academy of Drawing and Decorative Arts of Watermael-Boitsfort. In 1979, he transferred to the School of Plastic and Visual Arts in Uccle, Belgium, where his father served as Director until 2004. Fascinated with the brilliant and tragic histories of artistic forebearers like Egon Schiele and Francis Bacon, Mandelbaum drew and painted numerous portraits of prominent cultural figures accompanied by derisive scribbles, names, slogans, and Yiddish graffiti. Deeply affected by the wartime tribulations of his paternal grandfather Szulim, a Polish Jew who escaped the Holocaust, Mandelbaum was fascinated by the faces of some of the most notorious Nazis. In 1985, he had his first exhibitions—one at the Galerie Hugo Godderis in Veurne in northwest Belgium and another at the Galerie Christine Colmant in Brussels. Mandelbaum’s life was cut short when he was murdered, the result of his obscure involvement with a trafficked artwork. Though he never achieved financial or critical acclaim during his lifetime, Mandelbaum and his body of work were recognized in 2019 in a retrospective organized by the Centre Pompidou in Paris. His work is also the subject of a comprehensive monograph published by Les éditions Martin de Halleux.