Join us this Thursday, May 14 from 6:30-8pm for an online drawing workshop presented in American Sign Language (ASL) and inspired by "Ceija Stojka: Making Visible," featuring the work of Roma artist, activist, writer, lyricist, and singer Ceija Stojka (1933-2013).
Comprising more than sixty artworks, as well as a selection of sketchbooks, archival material, and documentary films made during Stojka’s lifetime, "Making Visible" explores the fullness of Stojka’s production as a visual artist, centered in her Roma life and heritage. Spurred by the resurgence of extreme right nationalism in Austria and abroad, and by her experiences as a Holocaust survivor, Stojka created works of profound beauty and horror that resonate today in strikingly contemporary terms
Please note this online workshop, hosted by teaching artists Nic Annette Miller @nicamiller and Joyce Hom @aslartneversleeps , will be in ASL with no voice interpretation. It is free and open to the signing community. Tap the link in our bio to learn more and register.
Join us this upcoming Tuesday, May 12, from 6:30-8pm for another Life Drawing Session in our galleries. All levels of experience and styles are welcomed. The session, led by The Drawing Center's Anna Oliver @akoliv , will provide a relaxing, social, and inclusive environment where participants can come together to sketch the human form in both quick and extended poses.
All sessions are 21+ and include a nude model, music, and a drink (alcoholic and nonalcoholic beverages available) with each ticket purchased.
Tap the link in our bio to purchase tickets and learn more. Tickets for our next Life Drawing sessions, on Tuesdays July 14 and August 11 and led by Isabella Kapur @isajkapart , are also available in our website.
Join us this upcoming Thursday, May 7 from 6:30-8pm for a special musical performance by Roma musician Petra Gelbart, along with her family ensemble featuring Patrik Gelbart, Julie Gelbart, and Helena Safarova, on occasion of "Ceija Stojka: Making Visible."
This evening of music and dance will celebrate the heritage, culture and enduring and resilient histories of Roma and Sinti People while also paying tribute to Ceija Stojka’s life’s work as an artist, activist, writer, and musician in her commitment to the irrefutable power of art to bear witness and voice resistance.
Tap the link in our bio to learn more and register.
When she was in her late fifties, on the cusp of the 1990s, Ceija Stojka began making art. Over the next two decades, she produced hundreds of works based on her early life experiences. Born into an itinerant family of horse traders in Austria, her traditional Roma childhood was brutally disrupted by the German invasion in 1938, after which she and her family were deported to a succession of concentration camps, including Auschwitz, Ravensbrück, and Bergen-Belsen. Though Stojka, her mother, and four of her siblings survived, the remainder of her extended family perished, together with some 500,000 Roma and Sinti.
Rounded up and held temporarily in detention or transit stations, those whom the Nazis designated “asocial” or “alien” were herded onto trains whose overcrowded wagons lacked furnishings, food, water, and sanitary facilities. Many died on the long journeys to the extermination and forced labor camps; others arrived brutalized at what Stojka terms “the terminus of horror.” Intended to humiliate and destabilize, the deportations were but the first in a highly choreographed series of stages designed to render internees nonhuman and hence expendable. In this, as well as in other works made during the mid-1990s, Stojka imbues nature with an expressive agency—here in the guise of an apocalyptic sky.
Tap the link in our bio to plan your visit and learn more about our current exhibition "Ceija Stojka: Making Visible," on view through June 7.
Nature was foundational in Ceija Stojka’s artistic vision. In the 2000s, it manifested in radiant pictures of the organic world, untethered from human presence. Images of a bountiful regenerative nature, as seen in this expansive field of poppies, offer a counterweight to graphic works made in the same years that focus on the Nazis’ genocidal project. Stojka noted ruefully that audiences rarely shared her preference for the “light” paintings over those with “dark” subjects.
On view now in our galleries, "Ceija Stojka: Making Visible," features more than 60 artworks by Roma artist, activist, writer, lyricist, and singer Ceija Stojka, as well as sketchbooks, archival material and documentary films.
Tap the link in our bio to learn more and plan your visit.
Early in 1943, Nazi authorities began the practice of registering each newly admitted prisoner to Auschwitz by means of a tattoo on their lower left arm. In addition to a serial number, Romani prisoners were given the letter “Z” for “Zigeuner” ("Gypsy"). Unlike many Holocaust survivors who concealed these tattoos in later life, Ceija Stojka openly displayed the number Z 6399 inscribed on her forearm.
Around 1990, when Ceija Stojka (1933–2013) began to make art, she was already known in Austria as a writer and an activist. Her 1988 memoir transgressed traditional Romani protocols by speaking out publicly of her experiences as a survivor of the Holocaust, at a time when the genocide of some 500,000 Roma and Sinti remained largely unacknowledged. Though Stojka took up painting somewhat fortuitously, she quickly recognized it could serve a means parallel to her writing: a way to bear witness to the shrouded history of her people’s genocide; to keep alive Romani cultural heritage; and to contest their escalating persecution by neo-nationalist forces then insurgent in her homeland.
Tap the link in our bio to learn more and plan your visit to "Ceija Stojka: Making Visible"
Our current exhibition, "Ceija Stojka: Making Visible" explores the fullness of Roma artist, activist, writer, lyricist, and singer Ceija Stojka's production as a visual artist, centered in her Roma life and heritage.
When she was in her late fifties, on the cusp of the 1990s, Stojka began making art. Over the next two decades, she produced hundreds of works based on her early life experiences. Born into an itinerant family of horse traders in Austria, her traditional Roma childhood was brutally disrupted by the German invasion in 1938, after which she and her family were deported to a succession of concentration camps, including Auschwitz, Ravensbrück, and Bergen-Belsen. Though Stojka, her mother, and four of her siblings survived, the remainder of her extended family perished, together with some 500,000 Roma and Sinti.
Whether rendered in visionary and metaphorical terms, distilled in an emotive abstraction, or manifest as lyrical naturalism, Stojka’s art is grounded in the specificities of the concrete and historical. Deeply affecting, her works attest to the power of art to bear witness in the face of destruction, chaos and autocracy.
Tap the link in our bio to learn more and plan your visit.
In 1995, Ceija Stojka returned to the site of the Ravensbrück women’s concentration camp for the first time, after some fifty years she was transferred, in January 1945, from there to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.
On the verso of this work, Stojka wrote: "We spread colorful flowers. Ceija and Nuna. Ravensbrück women’s camp. The firing squad yard and crematorium are outside the camp. The ashes of our dead were dumped into the lake. It was not until today, in 1995, that I knew why it was so cold in the camp back then, in 1944. And people fish here. I can’t believe that people who live there today catch fish from this lake where our souls are resting in ash."
On view now in our galleries, "Ceija Stojka: Making Visible," features more than 60 artworks by Roma artist, activist, writer, lyricist, and singer Ceija Stojka, as well as sketchbooks, archival material and documentary films.
Tap the link in our bio to learn more and plan your visit.
Brought up in a culture shaped by strong oral traditions, Ceija Stojka became an accomplished storyteller, a gift evidenced in Karin Berger’s documentary films (on view in our Lower Level Gallery). Stojka’s memoirs are similarly animated with vivid anecdotes and an eye for telling detail. In her visual art, Stojka set aside that personalized narrative voice: her carefully constructed compositions are designed to engage and guide the viewer’s response through expressive formal means, as much as through references and associations conjured by her subject matter.
Consider this work, sparked by Stojka’s memory of a traumatic episode from her internment at Auschwitz. As if playing a children’s game, an SS officer bends over, his head between his legs—only to viciously taunt her. The observer assumes the vantage of the artist’s younger self. Seen up close, the grotesquely inverted figure fills the pictorial field, blocking the verdant world beyond. The rough-skinned face—its steely blue eyes and leering grin framed by straw-colored hair—becomes monstrous. As in a classic folktale, the ogre’s gaze transfixes its interlocutor.
On the verso of this work, Ceija Stojka wrote: "You think you can’t escape me. I’ve got you. Hee hee hee."
Tap the link in our bio to learn more and plan your visit to "Ceija Stojka: Making Visible."
Visit us at Booth T05 at the @ifpda Print Fair starting this Thursday, April 9 through Sunday, April 12, to explore our selection of limited editions created in collaboration with leading contemporary artists Amy Sillman, Naudline Pierre, Walter Price, Elizabeth Peyton, Matt Mullican, and Ellen Berkenblit.
Reflecting our mission to champion drawing as a primary and dynamic force in art, these editions highlight artists who approach the medium with experimentation, material sensitivity, and conceptual rigor. All editions are generously donated by the artists, and 100% of proceeds support The Drawing Center's exhibitions, publications, and educational and community programs.
Tap the link in our bio to plan your visit.
Únete al Drawing Center el Sabado, 11 de Abril, a las 11:00am para un taller en persona de dibujo bilingüe presentado en español e inglés enfocado en nuestra exposición actual "Ceija Stojka: Making Visible."
Se proporcionarán todos los materiales de arte. Dale click al link en nuestra bio para registrarte.
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Join us in-person at The Drawing Center on Saturday, April 11, at 11:00am for a bilingual drawing workshop presented in Spanish and English that will focus on our current exhibition "Ceija Stojka: Making Visible."
All art materials will be provided. Tap the link in our bio to plan your visit.
This unique landscape marks an end to the numerous depictions artist Ceija Stojka made of nature in the 1990s as a refuge for her extended community of itinerant Roma travelers. In her memoirs, she recalls a favorite campsite—an arbor of three trees—where the family liked to park their wagons during their long summer travels. Silhouetted against a golden light, the copse of sturdy trunks harbors small birds that flit beneath the low branches. An elegiac paean to a cherished sanctum, the image melds and personal registers of loss and longing: the dispossession of a culture and traditional way of life, and the recent passing of her life partner.
The work is on view in our current exhibition "Ceija Stojka: Making Visible." The exhibition features more than 60 works by Roma artist, activist, writer, lyricist, and singer Ceija Stojka, as well as two documentary films made during her lifetime, and a selection of sketchbooks and archival material. Tap the link in our bio to learn more and plan your visit.
