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Art at the Cave

Seeking Warmth.

“It is the fundamental task of art to fight against alienation – to go to bat for authentic hearing, seeing, feeling, thinking against the stereotypes and societal patterns that are full of hostility towards being thoughtful and perceptive.” – Erich Fried in Rudolf Wolff (Hrsg.): Erich Fried. Gespräche und Kritiken, 1986. (My translation.)

***

If you look up the meaning of the word “authentic,” the Thesaurus suggests this: genuine, honest, true, real, original, unmistakable, historical. I cannot think of a better description of the art of Ceija Stojka (1933-2013) a Roma artist, Holocaust survivor, and activist whose work is increasingly displayed by major venues, providing welcome contrast to so much of the inauthentic hokum out there.

Ceija Stojka The Mama (detail with gallery entrance reflected in the glass covering the painting.)

Across the last few years the artist’s paintings, drawings and journaling were on view at Gallery Christophe Gaillard in Brussels, the Museum of the City of Lodz in Poland, at the European Roma Institute for Arts and Culture, at the 35th Bienal de São Paulo, at Kassel’s Documenta 15 in Germany, among others. Opening in April, they are at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris, in a group exhibition, Apocalypse. Yesterday and Tomorrow.

Luckily, we dont have to travel that far. Some of Stojka’s work is currently shown at the Vancouver, WA gallery Art at the Cave, together with exhibits by Daniel Baker and Sam Marroquin, and short videos about the artists by Erin Aquarian, in a show titled “Seeking Warmth.”

Stojka’s father was murdered by the Nazis even before the entire family was imprisoned in concentration camps. She, her mother and all siblings but one brother survived, despite being routed through Auschwitz, Ravensbrück and ultimately Bergen-Belsen. A miracle, given that out of 12 000 Austrian Roma, between 9000 and 10 000 perished during the Holocaust. After liberation, she attended school for a few years before she had her first child at age 15. She became a successful carpet merchant, and had two more children within the decade (two of whom preceded her in death, adding more tragedy.) It was only in her mid-fifties that she started to put her traumatic experiences into diverse forms of expression, music, self-taught visual art and journaling. It is no exaggeration to say her memories poured out, with over a thousand works of art and writing composed during the decades before her death at age 79 in 2013.

Ceija Stojka Untitled (Wagon in Forest)

Before I turn to her art, a grateful acknowledgement that individual people accompanied this artist to express herself and help bring about the prominence she has achieved. One of Austria’s most distinguished documentarian film makers, Karin Berger, was the first to engage with Stojka in the late eighties. A full documentary about the artist and her trauma, Ceija Stojka: Portrait of a Roma, was published in 1999. Lorely French, who taught German language and literature, as well as film and Roma writers, retiring this May after 39 years at Pacific University, was the artist’s friend. Importantly, she translated the first English version of the memoirs of Ceija Stojka, and is a founding member and member of the board of the Ceija Stojka International Association.

The art on display in the current exhibition is a small-scale version of Stojka’s oeuvre as a whole: there are the paintings that represent a “bright cycle” – scenes referencing life as the Romani people experienced it before the descent into the hell of the Holocaust. The acrylics are expressive, colorful, reminiscent of folk-art, and often quite sophisticated in their perspective for a self-taught artist. They report what was seen, but also communicate a sense of longing for a way of life that no longer exists. Wagons, streams, summer meadows, birds and flowers everywhere, and many people forming community around chores, more often seemingly idyllic than not. Exactly a way a child would experience her childhood, without the adult knowledge of how the Roma had to fight against prejudice and persecution long before the fascists arrived on the scene. It is a remarkable feat as an artist to be able to reproduce that experience from a memory store that by all means should have been overwritten by the horrors that followed.

Ceija Stojka Untitled (Wagon with people at stream)

These very horrors are captured in Stojka’s “dark cycle,” drawings in ink and some other materials that comprise the other half of her output. These drawings are often accompanied by text. For clarity, the English translations are repeating the meaning of the words, accurately conveying what was said (a choice I would have made as well.) What gets inevitably lost – and the part that makes her texts so indelibly authentic – is the orthography of the artist. Having had but a few years of school, after liberation and before she had her first child, Stojka writes how one hears the words, phonetically, and not according to our spelling and grammar rules. It gives the texts a texture of spontaneity and intensity, of words tumbling out of a mouth rather than a pen, providing the message with an amount of urgency that can simply not be captured in translation.

Ceija Stojka Ravensbrück 1944. Liberation 15.4.1945

These two cycles, bright and dark, interact to magnify the void caused by evil, by offering us the memorial building blocs of a remembered childhood, catapulted into the abyss. The longing for the wholeness of life before is drawing us in, and then spitting us out into the agony of what came after, or the bitterness of the realization of what the artist had to endure. The yearning for the remembered ideal frames the depicted trauma caused by genocide, multiplying the horror exponentially.

Ceija Stojka They devoured us.

We find both, personal grief and political anger in Stojka’s drawings and texts. What makes her so effective as a messenger is the concreteness of her reporting. She did seek warmth by resting amongst the dead (hence the title of the exhibition), shielding her from the wind. She fought off starvation by chewing and swallowing little balls of wool her mother had unraveled from the sweaters still on the corpses, or by eating grass pried from under the floorboards of the barracks, or sap clawed from trees. She banned despair by clinging to hope, perceived by her to be what gave them strength.

Ceija Stojka Hope – that was what gave us strength 1944

***

“Was wir suchen ist schwer zu finden. Die Angst, die müssen wir nicht suchen. Die ist da.” “What we are searching for is hard to find. We don’t have to search for the fear. That is there.” (Translation by Lorely French.)

***

Stojka’s relationship to fear is more complex. On the one hand, she models for all of us an incomprehensible amount of fierceness and courage in poems like this.

On the other hand, she describes, again concretely, a typical behavior that is the result of her experience: “You can’t walk along the street without looking over your shoulder.” (This sentence was juxtaposed with a quote by the poet Erich Fried, an Austrian compatriot who fled into exile after the Nazis killed his father and who survived the war in England. “For I cannot think without remembering.”)

Fear permeates the past, her book titled: Even Death is terrified of Auschwitz. It seeps into the presence – already in the year 2000, she worries about next generations forgetting history, and the fact that a far-right party joins the government coalition.

She proclaims soon after: “Ich habe Angst, dass Europa seine Vergangenheit vergisst und das Auschwitz nur am Schlafen ist. Anti-ziganistische Bedrohnungen, Vorgänge und Taten beunruhigen mich und machen mich sehr traurig.” (“I fear that Europe is forgetting its past and that Auschwitz is only asleep. Anti-Romani threats, happenings and attacks worry me and make me quite sad.”) (Ref.)

The fear, however, seems to be one of the motors for her activism to educate Austrians and the world about the history and the plight of the Romani people, activism for which she received accolades and awards. To this day, Austria has not officially recognized the Holocaust or the Samudaripen/Porajmos – in Austria referred to as the Holocaust of the Roma – through any legislative act; the Holocaust of the Roma is instead recognized as an integral part of the Holocaust as such. (Ref.)The Romani people, assumed to have originated in Asia, most likely Punjab or Kashmir, and who have never identified themselves with a homeland, have been persecuted since the middle ages within the various countries where they traveled and traded. The Porajmos saw up to half a million Roma murdered. Like Jews, they were segregated into ghettos before transport to extermination camps. After the war they were forced to settle in various locations. In post-war Czechoslovakia, where they were considered a “socially degraded stratum”, Romani women were sterilized as part of a state policy to reduce their population. As recently as the 1990s, Germany deported tens of thousands of migrants to Central and Eastern Europe, with large percentages of the Romanians among them being Roma.

Postcard work of Ceija Stojka (which I consider some of her strongest communications.)

Fast forward to our own times, where for the first time ever since 1945, Austria saw this far-right party, the FPÖ (Austrian Freedom Party,) win the most seats in national elections with garnering almost 30% of the vote last September. (The centrist parties managed to form a governing coalition some many months later that excludes the extremists.) A member of the FPÖ had only a few years back distributed anti- Romani, hate-filled videos on social media, but could not be criminally indicted since he is protected by immunity as a member of congress.) Anti-Roma hate crimes are frequent occurrences across Europe, with assault and arson attacks against homes physically endangering people. Ethnic hatred and claims of “Gypsy criminality” are clearly making a comeback in tandem with rising anti-Semitic sentiments fostered by extremists movements and now parties.

Fear can be a tool. It can motivate us to (re)act and fight for justice, as the artist did. It can be both, exploited and imposed by draconian measures and persecution, as radical right ideologies have successfully discovered. Fear of others, of globalization and immigration, of status loss or “replacement,” can be turned into hatred of scapegoats, often ethnicities other than one’s own. Fear of consequences of protest or non-conformity can smooth the path of authoritarians who want to consolidate power.

Ceija Stojka knew that, expressed that, resisted that. In life and in art.

***

Daniel Baker is a Roma artist and theorist of renown who lives in the U.K. He uses metalised polyethelene rescue blankets, sometimes sculpted, sometimes crocheted, to combine conceptual issues related to survival strategies and practices with a visual aesthetic that echos Romani patterns. Part of his theoretical work concerns the (in)visibility of ethnic minorities, particularly those that are not geographically anchored. In a somewhat ironic turn, his work could have been displayed a bit more visibly in the gallery – you had to work to discover it.

Daniel Baker Emergency Artefacts.

Sam Marroquin shows her series The Madness of War in the upper parts of the gallery. An astonishingly large number of charcoal and acrylic paintings were fitted into the space without overcrowding. Kudos to whoever hung this, likely Sharon Svec, whose curation of this exhibition is splendid overall. The paintings are simplified reproductions of scenes depicted on videos and print material of first hand experiences by those living through the hell that is contemporary Gaza. Put on paper with the artist’s non-dominant hand, they appear more like the drawing of a younger person, a lack of perfection and child-like approach that parallels what we see in the paintings of Stojka. Here, too, are concrete depictions of humans in existentially threatening situations, their bodies and spirits bombed into extinction, their grief more than a single life time can hold. Block letters introduce the artist’s suggestions of the emotions and thoughts likely experienced, all universal enough that they promise verisimilitude.

Sam Marroquin Paintings along the Gallery Wall from the series The Madness of War.

The work makes several strong points. For one, any claim that we have moved beyond atrocities imposed on any one group is moot. The indiscriminate killing of men, women and children, of rescue personnel and journalists/reporters is not a thing of the past, intentional starvation included. Secondly, the suffering depicted is universal, even if it is applied in this case to the particulars of the fate of Palestinians. We could as well be looking at Syria, Ukraine, Sudan or the Republic of Congo. And, importantly, Marroquin’s drawings reveal a humanity of the victims that will elicit empathy in all but the most hardened, allowing a sense of shared humanity across borders.

Sam Marroquin Paintings from the series The Madness of War

The issue, then, is the fact that all of these images were, as “originals,” available in public sources, live-reported during this conflict. They never made their way to those fixated on selective mass media or social media sources that are ideologically inclined to show some sides of suffering but not others. The polarization experienced in a country divided about our political future, is reflected in the visual diet that we consume, basically determined by what the powers that be put into the relevant “larders.” In some way, then, art that is not explicitly associated with media that we deem trustworthy or disreputable, respectively, might inform consumers whose minds can be opened if approaching artistic depictions without easily triggered prejudice. In theory. In practice, of course, we have to mourn the fact that the likely distribution of this important body of work pales in comparison to that of even the smallest partisan social media outlet.

Sam Marroquin Paintings from the series The Madness of War

Before we despair, and in honor of the remarkable resilience of Ceija Stojka and others exposed to existential threats, let me close with a poem (Ertrag is the German title) by Erich Fried, whose words introduced this review. (And yes, I’ve been a fan since my teens, when he was first published by the German publishing house Klaus Wagenbach, before anyone else took on his poetry.)

Dividend

Gathering hope
from solvable problems
from possibilities
from all that
which holds promise

Reserving
strength
for only that
which truly
requires action

Is the way to amass
quietly
a supply of
despair
never spent.

-by Erich Fried

SEEKING WARMTH

March 2025

ART AT THE CAVE, 108 EAST EVERGREEN BOULEVARD, VANCOUVER, WA, 98660, UNITED STATES360-314-6506 GALLERY@ARTATTHECAVE.COM

HOURS: TUES-THURS 11-5PM, FRI AND SAT 11-6

For specific upcoming programs related to the exhibition, go here.

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Art on the Road: Sculptures with stories.

If you asked me if I prefer exhibitions that feature a single artist or those that display the work of many different ones, I’d have a hard time deciding. I always find myself drawn to retrospectives of a particular artist, because they allow me to learn how someone develops, how they are open to change or impress with continuity of a chosen theme, and how life’s experience(s) can shape the evolution of creativity and skill.

On the other hand, seeing the works of many different artists riff off each other, or provide comparison basis for relative judgements, allow an assessment of the current state of the art and often help me to understand my own reaction to art better, my own taste, if you will.

Art at the Cave gallery rooms

Luckily, today we don’t have to decide between the two approaches: I’ll just present both. I managed to see a riveting retrospective of Sargent Claude Johnson‘s work at The Huntington Library in Pasadena, CA, still up until mid-May. I also visited Shapes that Speak, work by multiple members of The Pacific Northwest Sculptors Group (PNWS) shown during the month of April at Art at the Cave in Vancouver, WA. (I chanced on it, just before closing. Some of the work is truly interesting and you might enjoy looking at the portfolios. Here is a list of the PNWS members with their websites for your perusal.)

Tony Furtado Hiro the Hare

Shapes that Speak is such a catch-all title, but I would be hard pressed myself to come up with something more specific for a group exhibition that is not curated around a particular topic. If these sculptures speak, then surely in different languages, with different degrees of precision, loudness and pitch. Structure varies, just as texture and modes of expression. I would not call it a cacophony, but the Tower of Babel did come to mind.

Tony Furtado Husk

In a way that is the one drawback, compared to all the advantages conveyed by being a member of an artist collective – in this case Pacific Northwest Sculptors, long a treasure for the region – that provides mutual support and exchanges resources and ideas, educates and connects. Group exhibitions of member work can so easily become byzantine, with the viewers having to make their way through a seemingly haphazard collection, trying not to be distracted by too many voices at once, to stick with the metaphor. That said, whoever hung this show did admirable work in grouping exhibits otherwise all over the map.

Left to Right: Laurie Vail Dancer – Bill Leigh Flight – Laurie Vail Kingfisher

Left to Right: Jeremy Kester A Drop in the Ocean – LB Buchan Elysia – Todd Biernacki Homage (c’est un Magritte) – LB Buchan Propeller 2

Note that I believe both to be true: the advantages of artist groups like these far outweigh the disadvantages, and exhibitions could be showing off the strength of each artist if curated around a shared theme, or some underlying principle. Simply putting up recent or favorite displays does a disservice to much of the work that would otherwise shine.

Sherry Wagner Mary

Leslie Crist Portrait (photographed from different angles)

Here are some more examples of the diversity I encountered, in no particular order or preference.

Susan Jones Laminar Flow

Anne Baxter Solar Flare

Sherry Wagner Chip

If the work of the Pacific Northwest artists tell many different stories, Sargent Claude Johnson‘s retrospective at the Huntington is devoted to a main focus: the dignity and beauty of the Black subject in an era that still legalized racial discrimination. It is long overdue to see work from a master, namely a quarter century since his work was surveyed at SF MOMA, and one wonders why an artist who was so prominent during his lifetime has disappeared into the recesses of cultural memory.

The Black modernist (1887 – 1967), often associated with the Harlem Renaissance, lived on the West Coast for most of his lifetime and worked primarily as a sculptor in contrast to his painting East Coast associates, which might explain why he fell through the cracks when this movement experienced renewed interest by contemporary art critics. (In this context it might be or interest to visit a wide reaching exhibition on the Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism that just now opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC.)

Negro Woman (1933)

Johnson was born to a father of Swedish ancestry and a mother who was part Cherokee and part African American. While his brothers and sisters chose to be recognized as Native Americans or Caucasians, Sargent decided to live his life as a Black. Some of his work, like this portrait, focussed on the duality of his racial background. In his own words, “It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others… One ever feels his Two-ness, – an American, a Negroe; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body.”

Self Portrait (1950s)

This is about the most political statement by him that I could find. In general, the artist did not engage in propagandistic art, whether in his murals or in his work for collectors, and was wholly opposed to the social realism found in the work of other Black artists, like Elizabeth Catlett, Jacob Lawrence, and Charles White. He shared the somewhat apolitical aesthetic stance of a man he admired : Alain LeRoy Locke, the so-called father of the Harlem Renaissance, whose “New Negro” philosophy assumed that “a vibrant race tradition in art will contribute to American art and, in turn, this achievement will help bring about social equality.” (Ref.)

Langston Hughes, a former protégé of Locke’s, considered the Harlem Renaissance movement a failure because it was motivated by a fantasy that the race problem could be solved through art. He accurately wondered whether the contributions of an elite group of black intellectuals to American culture would bring about social change for the masses of African Americans.

Johnson drew from Southern Black folk-culture and African art as sources of inspiration, but also included aspects of Asian-Pacific art. Many elements of pre-Columbian or contemporary Mexican art can be found in his sculptures and friezes. He experimented with various modes, sculpture predominantly, but also painting and prints. A range of materials, wood, paper, metal, enamel, terracotta and more, can be found in his work.

Singing Saints (1940)

Dorothy C. (1938)

Johnson is probably best known for his sculptures, many of whom depict Black women, often with children inseparably attached, a valuable reminder that family separation is not just a thing of a slavery past. Immigrant families, separated at the border during the last eight years, are still not reunited, often due to (coincidental?) administrative omissions of identifiable characteristics that would allow tracing.

Standing Woman (1934)

Forever Free (1933)

Mother and Child (1932)

Some of Johnsons’ children’s busts received awards. Minor quibble for an exhibition that otherwise does a fabulous job in both placing and signage of work: why elevate the one non-Black head to central and elevated position? The little Asian girl was a playmate of Johnson’s children, but it feels weird that she is surrounded by the Black kids.

Clockwise from upper left: Head of a boy (1930) – Elizabeth Gee (1927) – Chester (1931) – Head of a Boy (1928) – Esther (1929)

Johnson worked all his life in side jobs to sustain his artistic practice. Money was tight, which had sorrowful consequences for his wife whose mental health declined and who spent the rest of her life in a mental institution. (The Huntington is truly helpful in providing much information of aspects related to the artist but not necessarily central to the art in its catalogue.)

Even though Johnson was picked for major commissions, including a 185-foot-long frieze for a San Francisco high school that displays an array of athletes, things never got easy. Other public artworks for the Depression-era Works Progress Administration included work for the  California School for the Blind in Berkeley.

The following architectural installations were all made for the CALIFORNIA SCHOOL FOR THE BLIND starting in 1933. There are window lunettes and a stage proscenium. The pieces were dispersed and now belong to the Huntington, The California School for the Blind, the African American Museum at Oakland and UC Berkeley – here reunited for the first time. You are invited to explore via touch!

Here is video that describes the work.

Below is a video screenshot and sketches for San Francisco’s George Washington Highschool Athletics Mural from 1941. Here is a full video.

Johnson’s life did not have a happy ending. He struggled with the ravages of alcoholism and died in 1967 in a residential hotel in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district, a somewhat rough neighborhood. His legacy should serve as an inspiration: he told the story of the dignity of people who were ignored at best, despised and discriminated against at worst, art created during a time where this was an act of defiance as well as an expression of hope against hope to help change perceptions.

Alas, this particular story is still ongoing.

Standing Woman (1934)

Here is music from the Harlem Renaissance. Lift every voice.

Sargent Claude Johnson

Feb. 17–May 20, 2024

The Huntington – Library, Museum, Botanical Garden

1151 Oxford Road

San Marino, CA 91108

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What to do with the past?

· Stitching Stories at Art at the Cave Gallery in Vancouver, WA. ·

“If nostalgia as a political motivation is most frequently associated with Fascism, there is no reason why a nostalgia conscious of itself, a lucid and remorseless dissatisfaction with the present on the grounds of some remembered plentitude, cannot furnish as adequate a revolutionary stimulus as any other: the example of [Walter] Benjamin is there to prove it.” – Fredric Jameson, “Walter Benjamin; Or, Nostalgia,” Marxism and Form, 1971 

Bonuspoints for a gallery that makes you wonder before you even set foot into the building! At least that’s how I reacted when I arrived in Vancouver to meet with one of the artists currently exhibiting at Art at the Cave and was greeted by a sign sporting multiple promises – some of which were indeed kept by the work shown inside.

Stitching Stories features multiple artists, loosely connected by work using stitching and weaving, their work triggering immediate associations of past, present and future for me, the flow of time signaling change.

Sharon Svec, part of the gallery team and one of the exhibiting artists.

Sam Yamauchi‘s A Messy Book of Mistaken Identity symbolizes the hazards of both, a search for and communication of identity to others. The stitched collages unfold in the here and now, boldly describing a process affected by variables all too familiar for many of us, rightly questioning if there is a permanent, identifiable self to be found.

Sam Yamauchi A Messy Book of Mistaken Identity

Sharon Svec‘s The Eyes Have It is an enchanting set of three eye-shaped, sculptural mobiles intricately woven from roots of ivy, some starting to sprout leaves in the warmth of the cavernous room. The robust material (have you ever tried to get rid of ivy roots in your garden?) takes on a more filigree appearance when laced together, light suffusing in both directions. The combination of light and eyes, three of them no less, triggered amused associations of clairvoyance, the third eye predicting the future – and the evanescence of such attempts. The German word for clairvoyance is Hellsehen, seeing the light. I have always believed that that is a much more applicable description of our take on the past when we come to inspect it, rather than a grasp on the future. But what do I know.

Sharon Svec The Eyes Have it.

***

The past, as it turns out, is what I came for, drawn by two bodies of work by Ruth Ross, Yiddish and The Doll Dialogues, respectively. More precisely, I was interested in how the artist approaches the past. Honoring the past in an attempt to defy impermanence, holding on to it to prevent its loss, turning nostalgic to retrieve remembered affect? Her frequent use of discarded fabrics, beyond their prime and found in thrift store bins or yard sales, often applied back to front, had a material feel of things dragged up, preserved to last. Yet with all her work, things go far deeper than that.

Yiddish is, in some ways, the perfect vehicle for considerations of preservation and loss, not just in the intimate sphere of what’s spoken in one’s family to which Ross refers. The language itself is about 1000 years old, spoken by Ashkenazi Jews, with the name Yiddish itself meaning Jewish. It had other names as well, Taytsh (German), Yidish-taytsh (Jewish-German), Loshn-ashkenaz (the Ashkenazi tongue), and Zhargon (jargon,) but Yiddish remained the standard reference since the 19th century. Before the Holocaust there were over 10 million people in the world speaking Yiddish, a number that was, in addition to the murder of 6 million Jews, further diminished by processes of acculturation and assimilation in America and the former Soviet Union, and by repression of Yiddish and acculturation to Hebrew in Israel. (Ref.)

Ruth Ross Balabusta (Housewife) Details below

Feh signals contempt…

The language itself went through many permutations but generally allowed people who were living in the diaspora to have a shared means of communication. It consists of multiple elements from other languages, Romance in origin, German and Rabbinical Hebrew among them. Each new region where Jews settled after having been driven out from other countries, developed its own vernacular, creating hybrid words, just as we see in so many other languages. The different dialects spoken throughout different European regions were interspersed in American Yiddish, when the immigrants arrived, and standard Yiddish now contains many English words as well.

It has been a two-way street, clearly. Many of the words Ross chose, stitched with wit, subtle hints, allusions to childhood memories and an attentive eye for type-face design, are part of our own English vocabulary, used frequently without knowing their origins. That is even more true for the German speaker. I certainly grew up with everyday words that turned out to be Yiddish when I thought they were German, adjusted in their spelling. In fact there are over 1000 of them, with about 30 in heavy rotation, Schlamassel (Shlimazl – bad fortune or things gone wrong,) malochen (physical labor, from Maloche – work,) Ganove (Gannew in Yiddish, a petty criminal) or Techtel-Mechtel (a fling, derived from the yiddish word Tachti, which means secret) among them.

Ruth Ross Schlemiel/Schlimazel (A Schlemiel is the person who spills the soup and a Schlimazel is the person it lands on…)

Ruth Ross Nu? (Whassup)

Last year I reviewed Ross’ extraordinary series, Red Scare, about being Jewish, politically active and under threat during the McCarthy era. It had a strong political voice, something that is less obvious but still notable in the current exhibition. To draw attention to a language that has long served to identify yourself as a target for anti-Semitism is the opposite to what so many Jews, particularly of the artist’s parent’s generation, were told to do in order to assimilate. There are whole books written about the slogan Dress British, Think Yiddish that encouraged Jews to blend in, in order to be admitted to institutions of higher learning, in particular the Ivy Leagues. Keep your identity inside, think, don’t speak Yiddish. Variations on this can be found as recent as a decade ago, when the originally Jewish sartorial empire, Saks Fifth Avenue, teamed up with a company that made adjustable stays for men’s shirt collars, imprinted with Yiddish words, functionally hidden from view in their little collar slots. The special collection’s name? “Think Yiddish, Dress British.”

Ruth Ross Schmatta (A rag, or piece of clothing)

Ruth Ross Nudnik (A pestering or irritating person. As the artist related, her Papa used to call her that in exasperation when she disturbed his peace.)

Here is work that draws attention to identity, created during a time when people are physically attacked on the street just for speaking Hebrew, two months ago in Berlin. A time when, closer to home, Marjorie Taylor Green suspected that California wildfires were started by Jewish space lasers, and exhibited during a time where Gaza has become a killing field. Plainly there are people in the world who will suspect us, dislike us and maybe despise us because we are Jewish. This point is certainly amplified by many people’s reactions to the horrors unleashed upon civilians in the Middle East. And therefore, unsurprisingly, there is some apprehension associated with letting people know that you are Jewish, and a Yiddish speaker. In addition to concern about vulnerability, many Jews feel some sense of shame or rage about what the government of Israel is pursuing in reaction to the horrifying attack by Hamas, and know we will be called anti-semitic if we voice our anti-Zionism, call for a cease fire or add our voices to the chorus of Jewish voices for Peace. To embrace an essential part of your identity then, in public, is a political act.

Ruth Ross The Royal OY and Gevalt

***

Ross’ second body of work references personal history as well, her life-long relationship with her dolls. Where Yiddish is explicit, straight forward, easily deciphered work, the Doll Dialogues appeared to me to be the opposite. Gauzy layers, combining laser prints on silk, gel prints on silk organza, and lace appliqués with occasional embroidery make for mysterious tableaux each with an obscured doll at its center.

If you are so inclined, they invite psychoanalytical interpretations of childhood memories, symbolized by the dolls, long veiled and inaccessible. After all, here is what Freud wrote:

. . . In the so-called earliest childhood memories we possess not the genuine memory-trace but a later revision of it, a revision which may have been subjected to the influence of a variety of later psychological forces. Thus the “childhood memories” of individuals come in general to acquire the significance of “screen memories”and in doing so offer a remarkable analogy with the childhood memories that a nation preserves in its store of legends and myths.

—Sigmund Freud, “Childhood Memories and Screen Memories,” 1901

If you are like me, you will rather think about the symbolic value that dolls take on in their respective contemporary settings. They might not always be as explicit and creepy as the ones used by Hans Bellmer, who withdrew into the privacy of his obsessions in response to the Nazi’s imperatives about healthy rather than “degenerative” art. They might not be as culturally appropriated as Max Ernst‘s works derived from his collection of Katsina dolls of Hopi origin. But dolls do have a role within a political context, just as they had symbolic value since their inception so many thousands of years ago, first in religious settings, then as status symbols for the aristocracy and eventually as a plaything intended to shape little girls into their roles of care takers and mothers in the context of the nuclear family.

Ruth Ross On the Bus

Ross’ depiction of her dolls is shrouded in more ways than the visual one. Their titles refer to occasions down the memory lane of the artist, rather than serving as explanatory pointers. Their appearance is at times surreal, at times androgynous, hazy and dark. Lace and silk notwithstanding, there is no sense of an exaggerated female presence, a dress-up tool or emphasis on beauty. No hint of happy, innocent tea parties. These collages are blissfully free of nostalgia, even when tied to personal experiences of the doll’s owner.

Why do I celebrate that, you wonder? What’s wrong with a bit of nostalgia?

We live in an era where nostalgia for the traditional role of women, playing house, being subservient, acting doll-like, enjoying the kitchen (Senator Katie Britt, we see you!) is making an organized come-back. It is signaled to a receptive public, yearning for a “traditional past” by ever so many flags, a baby voice appropriate for doll play among them. It has, however, nothing to do with how the dictionary defines nostalgia: “a sentimental longing or wistful affection for the past, typically for a period or place with happy personal associations.”

Rather, during (aspiring) fascistic eras it becomes a political tool: Reactionary nostalgia creates a cultural identity by mystifying past and present. The myths of racial superiority and the claimed heritage of a superior religion or immutable gender hierarchy promises succor to those who are feeling deprived and demoted in their present-day existence. That was true for historical periods in the last century, be it in Germany or Italy, or Spain. It is true now for Russian claims of rights to land and resources, and we see it in our own country when we look at the justifications for political movements, Supreme Court sanctioned and enabled, that try to turn the clock back and remove rights extended to those who did not originally occupy the top of a hierarchical ladder (for that matter, who still don’t…)

Ruth Ross She laid her Baby at my Feet detail below

Rather than engaging in nostalgia, we should acknowledge that the past cannot be completely retrieved, and should inform the present only in so far as it allows us to discern what parts of the past should not be repeated. Clinging to conceptions of power that should be assigned to certain people in perpetuity, at the expense of others, is unjustifiable. So is clinging to ideas of permanent victimhood, used as justification by people to become perpetrators regardless of the horrors that they will unleash.

Ruth Ross Love this Doll to Death

The dolls in this exhibition are ambivalent enough that they invite associations to both, object and subject, good and evil. They are a welcome reminder that we need to lift the veil that obscures some version of truth, a veil fashioned out of our clinging to an imagined past, blocking our vision of a more equitable future.

STITCHING STORIES

Ruth Ross & Sam Yamauchi

MARCH 2024: Artist Talk from 1-2 pm on Saturday March 16; a reading by Ruth Ross’ guest poet Leanne Grabel on March 23 at 3 pm.

ART AT THE CAVE, 108 EAST EVERGREEN BOULEVARD, VANCOUVER, WA, 98660,

Music today, how could I not, is the mechanical doll’s aria from Offenbach’s Hoffman’s Erzählungen.

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