English Professor’s Art on Display in Honors College Suite
Sharon Lubkemann Allen’s Ukrainian pencil drawings, dating from the period of Ukraine’s declaration of independence from the USSR, were first exhibited at Yale in May 1992. A selection of original drawings remaining within her collection are on temporary display in the Honors College suite in conjunction with the Honors College’s annual Honors Gives Back service project.
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). It was during this period that she produced the art on display in the Honors College Suite (Brown Building 132). Dr. Allen also has figure drawings on display in the Upper Gallery at HartGallery27 in Brockport during the month of September, where she’s selling some remaining Ukrainian prints to support RocMaidan, the charitable arm of the Ukrainian Cultural Center of Rochester.
A Professor of Comparative Literature within the Department of English and Honors College at SUNY Brockport and an 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. The selection of drawings on display recover and reframe 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.