Shedding Light on a Roma Artist, and the Fate of Her People

In 1943, Ceija Stojka, then 9 years old, and members of her Roma family were forcibly taken from their home outside Vienna to a series of concentration camps – Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen and Ravensbrück.

By the end of World War II, an estimated 500,000 Roma and Sinti (two historically marginalized ethnic groups in Europe) had been murdered, along with millions of Jews and other victims of Nazi persecution. Stoica, her mother and four siblings barely escaped this fate. Her father, brother and nearly 200 extended family members died.

It was only decades later that Stoica, now in her fifties, began to speak about her traumatic experience, first in the 1988 memoir We Live in Secrets: Memories of the Romney Gypsies, and then in paintings and drawings, drawing attention to the often-ignored history of the Roma genocide.

In Romani, this horror is called “Parajmos,” or “The Devourer” — and is captured in one of Stoica’s 1995 watercolors, a horrific scene in the esophagus of a screaming Nazi soldier, his red lips lined with tiny but menacing white teeth. “They devour us,” she wrote on the back.

New York audiences will finally be able to see the artist’s ambitions in the exhibition “Ceija Stojka: Becoming Visible,” which opens on February 20 at the New York Drawing Center. The most comprehensive exhibition of a contemporary American artist, it will include more than 60 paintings and drawings created between 1992 and 2011 (her death in 2013), as well as sketchbooks, archival materials and works. Documentaries filmed during her lifetime.

“Stoica’s work is a powerful and eloquent response to the Holocaust, particularly the Roma Holocaust,” said Lynne Cooke, former director of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, who co-organized the exhibition with Noëlig Le Roux. But, she adds, “The subject matter itself does not guarantee artistic eloquence or power of expression. It is the way they are crafted that makes them so powerful.”

Stoica’s images are not merely diaries or anecdotes, but a form of storytelling that conveys emotions and sensory memories through poignant detail, and she is determined to tell the story of her community’s past.

“I had to tell the story of their past lives, their lives today, and what happened to them,” she said in her 2008 book, “Auschwitz Is My Overcoat.” Her assignment included taking photos not only of the horrors she and her family endured, but also of the Roma lifestyle before the Nazis arrived in Austria in 1938—caravans in beautiful landscapes, pastoral scenes of her family and community.

These include “Sad Earth,” a 1998 mixed-media painting on cardboard that depicts gusts of wind and flocks of crows sweeping through a camp, past huddled figures and two guards goose-stepping among them. Careful interventions—including a red figure at the bottom edge of the frame, possibly a bloody corpse but possibly a hallucinatory ghost of death—suggest something poetic and alarming rather than reportage.

In other photographs, reportage is abandoned entirely in favor of expressionist brushwork and minimal mark-making, such as an untitled 2004 gouache and ink work rendered in quick strokes of yellow, ocher and brown that coalesce into faceless, emaciated figures. Stoica’s inscription underlines its tragic beauty: “April 15, 1945. We did not know yet that this day was our liberation day. That is how it happened.”

In a 2003 ink painting, Stoica abandoned the brush almost entirely, instead dipping his fingers and hands in black paint. These marks suggest a group of people shambling away from the viewer. “To the crematorium,” Stoica wrote at the bottom.

Economy of means does not reduce the emotional value of the picture – it enhances the painting’s power.

Cook noted that during the first ten years of Stoica’s practice, the artist focused on traditional genres such as landscape and still life painting. “But in the second decade, she started working in a more innovative way,” Cook said. “It became more of a modernist practice characterized by expressive forms, expressive abstraction, surrealist dream imagery, and textual and graphic works.”

Stoica first picked up a paintbrush with her granddaughter, working at the kitchen table in her large apartment in Vienna. (After being liberated from the refugee camp, she briefly resumed the itinerant Roma lifestyle, settling in the city in the 1950s.)

“The colors won’t let me go,” she wrote in 1995. “There was something here that patiently accepted me.” She has no formal training and doesn’t go to museums, but is likely to watch the nightly arts and culture programs on TV and see the exhibition posters plastered on the streets around her Kaiserstrasse.

“Artists don’t have to be academically trained to be constantly bombarded with images of contemporary art,” Cook said. “It filters in a different way, but it still works.”

Stoica turned to art out of a desire to make historical injustices visible even as they were erased: no Roma witnesses were called to testify at the Nuremberg trials; survivors faced serious obstacles in seeking to receive meager compensation; and centuries of discrimination and violence against Roma—including pogroms, deportations, forced sterilizations, housing and educational segregation—continued long after World War II. The group remains Europe’s largest ethnic minority.

But Stoica’s decision to challenge cultural taboos by speaking out about her Roma identity was also triggered by troubling political and social trends in Europe, particularly in Austria. “I fear Europe is forgetting its past and Auschwitz is just sleeping,” she once said.

“She felt the need to speak out and cross barriers that certainly existed for her because she sensed a rise in right-wing rhetoric,” said Ulrike Müller, a painter based in New York and Vienna who was living in Austria when Stoica began to develop as an activist and artist.

Revelations about Kurt Waldheim’s Nazi past (which did not prevent him from being elected President of Austria in 1986) and the increase in hate speech influenced her works such as Triumph of Our Führer! 》Since 2001. Two simple figures with yellow hair and distorted faces, rendered in brightly colored impasto, march against a crimson background decorated with swastikas.

Another work, titled “1945, Ravensbrücke, 1995” (1995), documents her return 50 years to the brutal women’s labor camp where she was sent near the Austro-Hungarian border. The image underscores the paradox of contemporary political drive to forget Austria’s complicity in the Holocaust: the foreground is of a lush resort, while the background depicts an acidic yellow sky and bare, charred trees. The inscription on the back reads: “I can’t believe the people who live there today fish from this lake where our souls rest in ashes.”

This tendency to connect the past and the present is an integral part of Stoica’s work, both artistic and otherwise. “She has always been one of us and then found a way to express her survival in the refugee camps through art and storytelling,” said Ethel Brooks, a Roma professor of women’s and gender studies at Rutgers University and president of the European Center for Roma Rights. “But she was also an activist who inspired and founded many Roma rights, historical and cultural organizations in Austria.”

Stoica was a key figure in pushing the Austrian government to recognize Roma as an official minority and was a strong advocate for reparations for Roma survivors of the Holocaust.

“As a woman, it’s important to do this within the patriarchal structures of her own community and Austria in general,” Müller said.

The exhibition also depicts fields of flowers (including the sunflower, a symbol of the Romani people) and the daily rhythms of traveling life. “Carpet Market” is a 1993 oil on cardboard painting of colorful carpets hanging under a canopy of flowering trees, with a blonde woman in the foreground – perhaps Stoica herself, who supported herself and her children as a carpet merchant before turning to art.

“These photos show the intimacy of family and the beauty of everyday life — that’s what appeals to me,” Brooks said.

Stoica’s work has been exhibited widely in Europe in recent years, including at the Reina Sofia National Museum in Madrid in 2019 and 2020. Times critic Jason Farago praised the exhibition, writing, “Stoica’s art also supports the possibility—even the necessity—of human creativity to resurrect and master history’s darkest chapters.”

The U.S. exhibition comes at a time when Roma artists are becoming increasingly visible in the contemporary art scene in Europe and to a lesser extent in the United States. Last year, a billboard project in New York’s High Line showcased the work of Roman artist Małgorzata Mirga-Tas, who is representing Poland at the 2022 Venice Biennale.

Brooks said she hopes the Drawing Center exhibition will shed light on Stoica’s role in contemporary art history while also opening up opportunities for “Roma cultural production in the Americas.” She noted that there are 12 to 15 million Roma in the world, with 1 to 2 million of them living in the United States; her own family arrived around the 1860s. “I think it’s also very important for us to have a Roma artist and an activist represented in an American museum.”

Most importantly, Brooks hopes the show will make it clear that “we are a people,” she said, rather than a collection of stereotypes. “We have history and we have struggles.”

Ceija Stojka: Making visible

February 20-June 7, Drawing Center, 35 Worcester Street, SoHo; 212-219-2166, drawingcenter.org.