November 14, 2024 – March 9, 2025

For over fifty years I have been a working artist using my hands as my primary tools. You might call the work a kind of slow improvisation. Rather than seeing a totally finished piece in my mind, it unfolds under my hands during the process of making. Art has not been an extension of my life – it is my life.  It is my way to deal with daily occurrences – whether they end up as objects on display or conceptual explorations.

I grew up in the town of Turtle Lake – population 600, in rural Wisconsin. There were no art classes in the public school, and the first drawing I remember making was in first grade – a Cannibal with a strategically placed palm leaf. My first teaching job was at Hastings College in Hastings Nebraska, where I met my future husband, Karl Gartung. 

We moved to Milwaukee in 1975; where I taught at UWM for three years, but did not receive tenure. In 1979, Karl and I cofounded Woodland Pattern Literary Center, and for years, like many other artists, I led a double life: Executive Director of Woodland Pattern by day and visual artist by night. Throughout the almost forty years at W. P. my personal work became informed by professional work: text as well as image revealing narratives. Trivial activities became art practice. 

After retiring in 2018, I now spend each day in my studio. In 2023, I was able to complete a major piece begun September 2,1996; an entirely beaded deer hide, covered with beaded journal entries, drawings, and hand-written poems by writers visiting Woodland Pattern. It is featured here along with a range of other works; some still in progress.

January 16 – March 30, 2025

Opening Reception: January 16, 4:30 – 6:30 pm in the Museum.

Gallery tours led by Museum Curator, Anna Sigridur Arnar:
Friday, January 24 at noon and Sunday, January 26 at 2 pm

February 27, 4-5:30 pm – The Museum will host the curator of Women at War, Monika Fabijanska who will give a gallery talk followed by discussion and engagement with the University and Grand Forks community. This event will be livestreamed.

February 28
9:00-10:30 am – The University Council of Women+ will host a breakfast to kick off Women’s History Month with Fabijanska to participate as a speaker at the Memorial Union.

1:00-4:00 pm – Fabijanska will visit with UND students.

6:00-8:00 pm at Empire Arts Center – The Museum will host a film screening of new films produced by two of the artists included in the Women at War exhibition, followed by a reception.

        The film screening will include:

–Alevtina Kakhidze’s film All Good (2024) (19 min 57 sec). This event will represent the North American Premiere of this work. In addition to being one of Ukraine’s most recognized contemporary artists, Alevtina holds the title of UN Ambassador for Tolerance since 2018.

–Dana Kavelina’s Marc Tulip, Who Spoke with Flowers (2018) (15 min 19 sec). Kavelina is an artist of international stature. Letter to a Turtledove, which is featured in the exhibition at NDMOA, was recently purchased at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

–Dana Kavelina’s Monuments (2022) (34 min 35 sec).

–Artists Kakhidze and Kavelina will be brought in during NDMOA programming via Zoom to participate in the discussion. The screening will be followed by a reception at the Empire Arts Center.

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Women at War is a critically acclaimed exhibition that introduces works by contemporary women artists from Ukraine. Featuring an array of media from painting, drawing, collage, sculpture, installation and video, the exhibition has been hailed as a “must see” exhibition and was listed twice on the top ten exhibitions of 2022. Curated by New York-based curator Monika Fabijanska, this exhibition was organized by Fridman Gallery in New York in collaboration with Voloshyn Gallery in Kyiv/Miami.

As Fabijanska explains:

“Women at War provides context for the ongoing war, as represented in art across media. Several works in the exhibition were made immediately following February 24, 2022, when Russia began the full-scale invasion of Ukraine; others date from the years of war following the annexation of Crimea and the creation of separatist Donetsk and Luhansk ‘People’s Republics’ in Donbas in 2014.

War is central to history. History has been written (and painted) by men. This exhibition provides a platform for women narrators of history and also examines gendered perspectives of war. Women are generally absent from the historical accounts of war, but violating a woman is seen as a violation of land and nation. Media images reinforce the perception of gender divide. But is war indeed gendered? Women comprise c. 25% of the Ukrainian armed forces. Russian soldiers rape Ukrainian civilians of all and no genders, including adult men. Yet, the majority’s experience remains tied to the traditional gender roles. Many artists in this exhibition struggle with the notion of victimhood and pose the question in what way women have agency during war.

The exhibition also offers an insight into Ukrainian and other Eastern European feminisms, which are significantly different from the Western mold. It contributes to the discourse about how national identity is tied to the perception of women’s role in society. There are parallels between the fight for Ukraine’s independence and the fight for the equality of Ukrainian women. They stem from the paradoxes of the Soviet Union, where early modernist, anti-nationalist, and feminist promises became but a fig leaf of propaganda for the increasingly brutal and misogynist patriarchal regime.

An independent Ukraine, burdened with its colonial past, the unimaginable wounds of the 20th century (the Holodomor, two world wars, and the Holocaust), and the actuality of a crisis, became obsessed with history. Ukrainian art of the 2010s was largely focused on the discussion of whether national identity should draw directly upon the short period of pre-Soviet independence or include the legacy of the Ukrainian SSR. The new generation of artists turned their attention to historiography – how history is written, who writes it, who and what remains invisible. Soviet painting, especially the interpretations of WWII, came into focus for many. Others organized around the critique of decommunization – the destruction of Soviet monuments and mosaics in Donbas spearheaded by the post-Maidan government – and turned towards the blanked-out pages of history.

•  •  •  •  •

Dana Kavelina (b. 1995 in Melitopol) explores perceptions of war outside mainstream narratives. Letter to a Turtledove (2020), acquired from the exhibition for the collection of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, is an experimental anti-war film-poem about women in the Donbas conflict zone, which invites us “to think of a victim as having certain subjective agency who is not involved in the reproduction of violence yet absorbs it. This is her strength.” The agency of the victim and gender roles of women in wartime are also explored by Alena Grom (b. 1976 in Donetsk) in the series of photographs Womb (2018), inspired by the stories of women who gave birth while living in the war zone in Donbas; by Oksana Chepelyk (b. 1961 in Kyiv) in her video Letter from Ukraine (2014), which abstracts the war role of a woman who is a mother into a choreography; and by Vlada Ralko (b. 1969 in Kyiv) in her drawing diary of everyday horrors of the war, published daily on Instagram (2022), which follows her famous Kyiv Diary (2013-2015).

A vivid discussion about historiography among Ukrainian artists concerns historical painting. Anna Scherbyna (b. 1988 in Zaporizhia), whose Some landscapes of the left-bank Ukraine (2016-19) subvert the historical genre of painted ruins, depicted the devastation of Donbas in miniature watercolor landscapes. The critique of Soviet battle painting is central to art practice of conceptual painter Lesia Khomenko (b. 1980 in Kyiv), whose Max in the Army – a monumental full-figure portrait of Khomenko’s husband, an artist himself, joining Territorial Defense of Ukraine – was painted in March of 2022. In her paintings of soldiers, Khomenko, who became a refugee in the U.S. and can only follow the war on screen, focuses on the ways in which military obscure their appearance and location on social media, and on the slow disintegration of the figure – a metaphor for the soldiers’ fate.

Another artist investigating the role of art in historiography, Yevgenia Belorusets (b. 1980 in Kyiv), explores the ways to render truth and attain objectivity in documentary art, and chooses Ukraine’s marginalized groups as her subjects. The exhibition features a selection from Victories of the Defeated (2014-1017), a series of more than 150 photographs and texts devoted to post-industrial Ukraine, work in coal mines at the edge of the war zone, and contemporary forms of labor.

Alevtina Kakhidze’s (b. 1973 in Zhdanivka, Donetsk oblast) piercing series of drawings, Strawberry Andreevna (2014-2019), narrates five years of telephone conversations with her mother who – like other retirees – stayed in the occupied Donetsk region. It ends in January 2019, when Ms. Andreevna died of cardiac arrest while crossing the demarcation line between the self-proclaimed “Donetsk People’s Republic” and Ukraine to collect her pension.

Zhanna Kadyrova (b. 1981 in Brovary, Kyiv oblast) created Palianytsia (2022) in a village in Western Ukraine, where she evacuated from Kyiv. Large stones smoothed in local rivers reminded her of the typical Ukrainian bread, palianytsia. Because Russians cannot pronounce it properly, the word serves to identify the enemy.

A consequence of the war in Ukraine lasting almost eleven years is mental health crisis, about which women artists speak openly. In the words of Dana Kavelina, “depression is the only adequate strategy in a situation where it is impossible to influence real political processes.” Kateryna Yermolaeva (b. 1985 in Donetsk), cut-off from her family and home in Donbas, suffered an identity crisis. It led the artist to dress up as non-binary characters, and explore the idea of self as composed of multiple personalities (Photos, 2016-). In Olia Fedorova’s (b. 1994 in Kharkiv) poetic take on land art titled Defense (2017), anti-tank hedgehogs are made of paper to symbolize the futility of the mind’s attempt to escape the reality of war. During the battle for Kharkiv, bombed by the Russians from February 24 through May 13, 2022, in an underground bomb shelter, lacking access to art materials and the ability to work in landscape, Fedorova created prayer-poems written on bed linen and clothes. Tablets of Rage (2022) cast a spell on the enemy in felt pen, but echo centuries of stitching as a form of creative expression and as an important healing and meditative practice of Ukrainian women.

The exhibition features the 1967 Sketch for the mosaic panel “Blooming Ukraine” by Alla Horska (1929-70), situating this contemporary art exhibition in the context of the legacy of women’s art and political activism in Ukraine. Horska – an artist and dissident – fought to preserve Ukraine’s culture and language under the communist regime. In 1970, at the age of 41, she was murdered – presumably by the KGB. Like Frida Kahlo, she inspires artists who try to reconcile the legacy of socialism with national culture.”

•  •  •  •  •

Women at War traveled to the Eastern Connecticut State University; Wesleyan University, CT; Stanford in Washington, D.C., Florida State University Museum of Fine Art in Tallahassee, the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, and the Chicago Cultural Center. The North Dakota Museum of Art is the last stop of the exhibition’s tour.

About the Curator: Monika Fabijanska is an independent art historian and curator who specializes in women’s and feminist art. Prior to Women at War, she curated Betsy Damon. Passages: Rites and Rituals (La MaMa Galleria) listed among The New York Times best shows of 2021, ecofeminism(s) (Thomas Erben Gallery, 2020), and The Un-Heroic Act: Representations of Rape in Contemporary Women’s Art in the U.S. (John Jay College CUNY, 2018). Fabijanska initiated the idea and provided curatorial consulting for The Museum of Modern Art’s retrospective exhibition of the sculptor Alina Szapocznikow (2012). She teaches curatorial practice at New York University and is a 2023 recipient of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts’ Curatorial Research Fellowship. monikafabijanska.com