Exhibit at Maine Jewish Museum 'Traces' Artist's Past

PORTLAND DAILY SUN
By Timothy Gillis

Deborah Klotz's pages from Dante's "Inferno,"

MAINE---Deborah Klotz knew she had rediscovered something special. In 2009, while looking through old books, she came upon her copy of Dante's "Divine Comedy," first read and written in when she was a freshman at Brandeis University in the early 1980s. She thumbed through her old margin notes and highlights, sketches of unwitting classmates, and dreamy doodles. She started to see it as a doorway to the past, as well as the future, and envisioned an art exhibit that would be set in an elevator. "You know, the whole notion of going up and down, as it relates to heaven and hell," she said while installing part of "traces," a new exhibit that opens at the Maine Jewish Museum Thursday night and runs for the next two months. Her pages from Dante's "Inferno," the first third of the epic work, are layered with years of her reaction to the story of a man guided through hell before he can ascend to heaven. [link]