Brockport Today

Professor Creates Art Exhibit to Help Raise Funds for Ukraine

Dr. Sharon Lubkemann Allen, Professor of Comparative Literature and Artist, organized an art exhibit and fundraiser to bring the College and local community together in support of humanitarian aid to Ukraine.

Double Exposure: Aspirations/Apparitions from Another Decisive Time - Drawings & Documentary Photographs from Ukraine, 1991-1992

An Exhibit in Support of Humanitarian Aid to Ukraine. All profits and donations directly support ROC Maidan’s effort to provide critical medical equipment and emergency humanitarian relief in Ukraine.

When: April 9-30, 2022 (Opening Day April 9 from 5-8 pm)
Where: Hart 27 Gallery 27 Market Street, Brockport, NY 14420
Contact: thehartgallery27@gmail.com/www.hartgallery27.com

Hours:

• Thursdays from 2-6 pm
• Fridays & Saturdays from 2:30-6:30 pm
• Sundays from 1-4 pm
• Friday, April 22 from 5:30-7:30 pm: Reading of Ukrainian poetry and prose in English translation, with selected poems also read in Ukrainian and Russian.

Double Exposure brings together drawings and prints documenting everyday lives during the months encompassing Ukraine’s declaration and realization of independence from the crumbling Soviet Union, August-December 1991. Provide contexts for and conversations with images from the current crisis, these old and new works seek to cultivate an understanding of and engagement with Ukraine and with those displaced within and beyond Ukrainian borders.

All profits from the sale of any art works donated by the artist to humanitarian aid efforts for Ukraine and Ukrainian refugees.

Concurrently with the exhibit, the artist is also organizing a fundraiser Art Acts - Humanitarian Aid for Ukraine, supporting the extraordinary and effective efforts of ROC Maidan, the charitable branch of the Ukrainian Cultural Center of Rochester, to provide essential medical equipment and supplies, humanitarian aid and supports for injured and displaced Ukrainians. 

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 salvaged, scanned, printed and framed the black and white photographs included in this exhibit. These are presented as first takes and doubletakes. A Professor of Comparative Literature within the English department at SUNY Brockport and interdisciplinary artist whose scholarly and creative work contends with traces and trajectories of cultural memory in transcultural consciousness, Lubkemann Allen engages Slavic, Lusophone, and European 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 just tasting freedom and now committed to its defense and development.

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