Meet the artist
Who was the artist?
Harley Gaber navigated multiple identities and disciplines. He saw himself as both American and German, both Black and white, both Jew and Buddhist. He bridged past and present through German music and the images he gathered as raw material.
Gaber’s creative journey began with music. Influenced by his studies under Darius Milhaud and later Kenneth Gaburo, he was drawn to the music of Arnold Schoenberg. In 1964, at the age of 21, he moved to New York City and began composing minimalist music while studying under William J. Sydeman at the Mannes School of Music. To support himself, he worked as a copyist for John Cage. In 1966, he published his first composition.
Though he had no formal training in the visual arts, Gaber began creating pen-and-ink works in the 1970s, which he called “graphic music.” By the 1980s, he had transitioned to photography. In 1993, he began using xerography for photomontage and ultimately completed Die Plage over nine years, working with more than 4,200 canvases.
How he worked
Harley Gaber began work on Die Plage in 1993 using images, a copy machine, scissors, paper, and gesso. The film clip at the bottom of this section shows him at work. While caring for his ailing parents, he sourced images from the interwar period in Germany (1918-1945). In his preference for libraries over the World Wide Web, Gaber demonstrated a tendency towards engaged, in-person research. His seven trips to Germany enabled him to explore state archives and libraries, memorabilia shops and flea markets.
Gaber worked on Die Plage every day. In the first ten months, he created 500 canvases, each measuring 16” x 20”. Within two years, he had produced 1,160 canvases—a pace of about 11 canvases a week.
For inspiration, Gaber listened to jazz and minimalist music from the 1920s and 1930s. He also regularly tuned into Rush Limbaugh’s three-hour daily radio show. In Limbaugh’s anti-immigrant rhetoric, especially after California voters passed Proposition 187 in 1994, Gaber heard echoes of Hitler’s racial ideology. Though Proposition 187 was later overturned in court, it aimed to deny public benefits to undocumented immigrants and reflected growing anti-immigrant sentiment in the state. Gaber believed that California liberals, much like German Social Democrats in the 1930s, failed to adequately reckon with this sentiment.
Gaber’s minimalist music explored tones between whole notes. This attention to subtle shifts in tones mirrored his keen ear for human conversation. Like a human tuning fork, he tuned into the social dissonance surrounding immigration and captured it in Die Plage.
Where he worked
Harley Gaber’s first studio was a small but highly visible retail space located in a hotel in downtown San Mateo, California. In January 1997, he relocated to another retail space on B Street, in a low-rent area of San Mateo. However, after local skinheads demonstrated an unsettling interest in his canvases depicting Nazis, he moved again in November 1998 to a garage near the Bayshore Freeway. This private space offered more room, greater privacy, and high walls for Gaber to experiment freely. Here, he arranged his long runs of five-high canvases like notes on a staff, creating installations that resembled musical scores.
In late 2000, Gaber moved to Newport, Oregon, to join his then-partner, Christina Ankofska. His final studio, rented in January 2001, was located in a former YMCA building. Its expansive floor space and high ceilings gave him ample room to assemble his thirty- and sixty-foot-long murals. He continued working there until he completed the final pieces of Die Plage in September 2002.
Why he created Die Plage
Harley Gaber’s motivations for creating Die Plage stemmed from a complex mix of anger, fear and ambition. He was angered by those who framed World War II, fascism, and the Holocaust as distant horrors confined to the past and to foreign lands. Gaber believed the same dangerous forces were percolating in the US during the mid-1990s. He rejected simplistic narratives of good versus evil or victims versus perpetrators, and Die Plage became the expression of his opposition to these oversimplifications.
Gaber’s fear stemmed from rising anti-immigrant sentiment in the 1990s and 2000s, which he saw as echoing Nazi racial ideology. Listening to Rush Limbaugh’s three-hour long daily broadcasts gave him insight into the prevailing political climate. The September 11, 2001 attacks further amplified American fears of Arabs and Muslims. The subsequent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, plus Limbaugh’s rhetoric about a “clash of civilizations” heightened Gaber’s concerns and provided a sense of urgency to his artwork.
Gaber’s ambition drove him to address this deeply fraught and dangerous subject without formal artistic training. Many artists, particularly Germans, have drawn inspiration from material from the Weimar era through the Third Reich. Did Gaber believe he had something to say about those interwar years that no other artist had said before? His bold use of photographs from the Holocaust as raw material further underscored his ambition. Some critics considered those images sacrosanct. One such critic, Mark Shlim, condemned Gaber for modifying those images and undermining their documentary integrity after seeing Die Plage exhibited in Los Angeles in September 2000.
The scope of Die Plage—over 4,200 canvases—also speaks to Gaber’s relentless ambition. Its sheer scale made it nearly impossible to exhibit, and he had neither gallery representation nor plans to sell the work.
Gaber’s profound affinity for German culture, from Schoenberg’s music to German expressionism and Bauhaus architecture, shaped his artistic vision. During the nine years he worked on Die Plage, his frequent travels to Germany intensified this connection. Although he was not German, this deep engagement prompted him to identify and imagine himself as both a German and a Jew. This enhanced the dissonance and tension that imbues Die Plage.
Gaber's curricula vitae
The professional accomplishments of Harley Gaber in music, photography and art.
View professional accomplishments
Gaber's music
A tribute by Eric Richards on the occasion of Gaber’s death in June 2011, published on the website of the New York City-based ISSUE Project Room.