In conjunction with her exhibit Double Exposure: Apparitions/Aspirations from Another Decisive Time, Drawings and Documentary Photographs from Another Decisive Time, Ukraine 1991-1992, Sharon Lubkemann Allen has organized Art Acts to raise funds for humanitarian aid. Art Acts donations will directly and entirely support the purchase of medical equipment and critical humanitarian relief requested by and delivered to medical and refugee centers in Ukraine by ROC Maidan, the extraordinarily devoted and effective humanitarian aid arm of the Ukranian Cultural Center of Rochester, which the artist is supporting along with the RPO and other local arts organizations. The artist will also donate all profits from the exhibit and is coordinating a drive for specific medical and humanitarian supplies.

In 1991, Sharon Lubkemann Allen received a Henry Hart Rice Fellowship to spend five months on the road and another five in the studio working on independent research, documentary work, and drawing related to Ukraine and Russia, after graduating from Yale University (BA 1991, in Soviet and East European Studies with concentrations in comparative literature and fine arts). Her Ukrainian pencil drawings were first exhibited at Yale in May 1992. Double Exposure includes original drawings remaining within the artist’s collection as well as prints of a few within others’ collections. Some of these prints are embedded within new sculptural frameworks, images reimagined and reframed through a transhistorical and transcultural imaginary. The documentary photographs were never printed or exhibited, partly because many of the negatives were ruined in circuitous transit from Ukraine and Russia during a rather volatile time. Over the past few weeks, the artist has salvaged, scanned, printed and framed the black and white photographs included in this exhibit. These are presented as first takes and doubletakes, in dialogue with images from the current crisis. A SUNY Professor of Comparative Literature and interdisciplinary artist whose scholarly and creative work contends with traces and trajectories of cultural memory in transcultural consciousness, Lubkemann Allen engages Slavic and East European, Portuguese and other European, Brazilian, Luso-African texts and cultural contexts linked with her own complex migrations and cultural imaginary. This exhibit recovers and reframes her memory of Ukraine, with images that have surfaced in the context of the current war as apparitions, invoking the aspirations of a young artist and nation, then begining to negotiate new freedom and now committed to its defense and development.

The Double Exposure exhibit of documentary prints and drawings is in the lower principal gallery of the HartGallery*27 (27 Market Street, Brockport, NY 14420). The exhibit continues in the upper gallery with recent scultpure and sketches engaged with migrations in a global context.

See https://www.lubkemannallen.net for more information on the exhibit as well as links/resources including historical contexts, literature and art, and humanitarian aid efforts related to Ukraine and the global plight of refugees.

22 April 2022 - Update - Thank you to all who have come out to the exhibit so far, who have supported the fundraiser, and who participated in last night's extraordinary reading of Ukrainian poetry and prose at the gallery. I've posted the program and list of Ukrainian writers on my website.

Art Acts - Humanitarian Aid for Ukraine

By Sharon Lubkemann Allen

Art Acts - Humanitarian Aid for Ukraine

Double Exposure: Drawings & Documentary Photographs, Ukraine 1991-1992 - Art Exhibit/Fundraiser