Don’t Close Your Eyes | Madison Eagle Article

One piece, “Shelter” by Kyiv artist Olga Zaremba, appeared to one observer to show a huddled body taking the form of sandbags in lonely anticipation of a bombardment. In another, “I Am Stone” by Olena Shtepura, the human body is crouched in the fetal position, its skin gray and hardened as a rock.

“Difficult” was a word that several gallery visitors used to describe the exhibit during an opening reception Friday evening, March 3. “Expressive” was another.

Saint Elizabeth University arts department chair and gallery director Virginia Butera noted the abstract, different or unexpected ways the artists express themselves, as the pain and trauma of war must be so difficult to conceptualize visually.

John Pietrowski, who runs the MCAC gallery as director of arts and events for the Madison Arts & Culture Alliance, turned to a phrase he would often use as the former artistic director of the Playwrights Theatre of New Jersey.

“I would say that everything you do in a room changes the room forever,” he said. “You put something like this in a room and the room has become a different room, and it will be a different room for the rest of the time that it is a room.

“This does that. This connects us to our larger world. Here we are in Madison, this suburb of New York, and this is a way for us to be connected to some horror we can’t even imagine.”

From Kyiv To Kings Road

Olya Powzaniuk, a lifelong artist and a Ukrainian-American from Basking Ridge, is co-curator of “Don’t Close Your Eyes.” She worked with fellow artists and co-curators Hanna Melnyczuk, a Ukrainian-American in Massachusetts, and Kyiv native Halyna Andrusenko, to create the traveling exhibit.

The three had been on Zoom calls with friends and family in the weeks following Russia’s invasion in March 2021.

Powzaniuk, whose parents fled Soviet-controlled Ukraine around 1950, recalled the horror of watching the Russian invasion unfold on TV last year, fearing she would never again be able to visit the people and places she has grown to love over numerous visits to her family’s homeland.

“On one of these Zoom calls we decided that we’ve got to do something,” she said in an interview at the gallery the day before the reception. “We’re artists, so we talked about what’s going to happen to the beautiful buildings, the cathedrals, the artifacts from 500 years ago? What is going to happen to the artists?”

One can find the answer to Powzaniuk’s first question in images across “Don’t Close Your Eyes,” several of which depict statues wrapped in white sheets. As Russia has destroyed – and many believe targeted – numerous Ukrainian cultural and heritage sites throughout the war, Ukrainians have protected these markers of their national identity by encasing statues in sandbags, sometimes metal and wiring, and wrapping them in sheets.

As for the artists living through the invasion, the curators decided they would create an exhibit showcasing the work of young artists “who woke up one morning in a peaceful country, and the next they find themselves in war,” said Powzaniuk.

The curators connected with artists throughout Ukraine through their social media accounts to submit original artwork to the planned exhibit. Powzaniuk initially intended to gather the artwork during a visit to Lviv last summer, but after arriving she found Andrusenko had already gathered many of the works, or the artists had mailed them themselves.

“Don’t Close Your Eyes” is now on its third stop in the U.S., following two shows organized by Melnyczuk in Massachusetts. From what Powzaniuk can tell, the show is the only exhibit in the U.S., Canada or Europe that shows the work of Ukrainian artists triggered directly by the war.

“All other art shows show current works, their beautiful works from the past, landscapes, florals, et cetera,” she says. “As far as I know we are the only ones taking on this war… artists reacting to what they see around them.”

Defiance Through Expression

Art prints were sold from atop a piano in the center of the gallery Friday. Half of the proceeds from the show’s art sales go directly to the artists in Ukraine, and the other half to organizations supporting Ukrainian defense and relief efforts.

Madison artist Bette Blank attended the reception with Joanne Collins, a friend from Basking Ridge.

“It’s hard to realize how people are expressing themselves here – missiles, skeletons. You know what’s happening from TV, but to see the way they’re expressing themselves is touching, it’s sad,” said Blank.

Allan Wood, a Maplewood photographer whose work will be featured in the MCAC gallery in May, noted the monochromia of the mostly black and gray exhibit as a bleak expression of what the artists are experiencing.

Pietrowski, the gallery director, said he was “devastated” when he saw some of the pieces for the first time, but was most affected by a pencil and marker drawing titled “Devotees” by Ilya Yarovoy. The image shows a group of pet dogs sitting together amid the destruction of the war.

“That an artist in the middle of everything that’s going on would draw that, it said to me how normal and regular their lives were, how much they’ve been disrupted, and how much they want it back,” Pietrowski said.

Visitors will find a piece from each of the three curators in the exhibit, in addition to those of the artists they connected with over social media. Powzaniuk, a pastelist, painted an empty, bombed-out home, with a songbird perched atop exposed rebar jutting out a shattered wall.

The painting is titled “Gone ‘Til Freedom Sings.”

“Hope springs eternal with this little bird,” she says, “but it’s gone until freedom sings and that little bird sings again. Many people will be gone from Ukraine, until freedom comes back.”

Under these conditions, Pietrowski said the desire to create, no matter what art is created, is hopeful.

“It’s moving towards life,” he says, “not away from life.”

“This creativity in the face of the war, it’s not just a lesson that we teach about Ukraine, it’s a lesson that we teach about all humanity.”

Upcoming Events

Both Powzaniuk and Pietrowski noted the “Don’t Close Your Eyes” pieces found their way to Madison – and soon to Saint Elizabeth University in Morris Township – thanks in large part to coordination from Lynn Siebert at Morris Arts.

While the pieces hang in Madison through April 2, the Madison Arts & Culture Alliance is planning various events to coincide with the gallery exhibit. The gallery is open to the public throughout the week, mostly from noon to 5 p.m., though hours vary depending on the center’s event schedule.

First, the center will host the Thomas Edison Film Festival at 7:30 p.m. Friday, March 24, to screen two films on Ukraine: “City of Ghosts” and “Khuylo – War in Ukraine.”

Next, at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, March 29, the space will host a reading from Madison resident and poet Yana Kane-Esrig.

Kane-Esrig has been translating poetry from writers currently in Ukraine and reading them at monthly poetry readings at the arts center. She will read a number of poems she has assembled at the March 29 event.

Pietrowski is also working to schedule a special Ukrainian piano and dance performance to close out the exhibit on April 2, and a documentary film screening on April 1 from Ukrainian filmmaker Roxy Toporowych.

In addition, residents are invited to visit the Therese A. Malone Art Gallery at Saint Elizabeth University beginning Wednesday, March 29, to see several of the “Don’t Close Your Eyes” pieces on display in a new exhibit, titled “Placed & Displaced.”

A reception will be held from 5 to 7 p.m. that night, followed by a panel discussion from 7 to 8:30 p.m.

The exhibit is sponsored by the school’s Center for Holocaust and Genocide Education. Rich Quinlan, director of the holocaust center, joined Butera, the director of the Malone gallery, at the opening of the Madison exhibit Friday.

“We’re honored to be a part of this,” said Quinlan. “We felt that this matched up perfectly with what our center is trying to achieve. The work is stunning, it’s so powerful and so incredibly expressive, it captures the horrors of the war so effectively. It’s difficult, but we’re excited to have it here, open up a lot of people’s eyes and expose the nightmare of the war through a unique medium.”

To learn more about the Madison Community Arts Center and its programs, visit www.madisonartsnj.org/mcac.

To find a public Facebook group that includes many of the “Don’t Close Your Eyes” artists and provides updates on the exhibit, search for “Don’t Close Your Eyes: Ukrainian Artists Respond to the War” on Facebook.