Deborah Aschheim has been trying to understand and visualize memory. From 2009-2011 she was the Visiting Artist at the Memory and Aging Center in the Neurology Department at UC San Francisco Medical School. She is currently working on drawings, sculptures, and installations that she hopes will trigger a personal experience of collective memory.
“The drawings are of known people, so almost everybody can relate to those memories,” she said, explaining an installation currently on view at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum in Yorba Linda, CA, created to commemorate the 40th anniversary of President Nixon’s televised resignation on August 9, 1974. Her current work has now grown to include the presidencies of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Baines Johnson, told primarily by non-famous people who visited the presidents during their administrations.
