John P. Birkelund Lecture

Making Visible: The Art of Ceija Stojka

In this talk, Lynne Cooke focuses on the loss of the traditional Roma way of life that the artist Ceija Stojka experienced as a young girl traveling with her family of Lovara horse traders in Lower Austria in 1933-39. She then looks at Stojka’s artwork that bears witness to the persecution of Roma and Sinti under the Nazi regime, which the artist witnessed when she was interned in three concentration camps from 1943-45. Stojka, Cooke suggests, conceived of her corpus of works as both testaments to oppression and murder and as warnings to future generations.