I write this reflection from the tail end of a two-week artist residency at Art in Motion in Holdingford, Minnesota. I was not expecting to work with cyanotypes in this residency, nor had I ever done so “seriously”. While packing a few things from my studio at MCAD to bring with me, I came across a forgotten pack of “Sun Print” papers I must have bought at the Science Museum years ago as a little treat for my inner child. I brought them with me, and immediately fell in love with this hands-on transformation process. Having worked mostly digitally in the past, I love how cyanotypes are made in collaboration with the natural elements of sunlight and water, and mirror the precarious nature of life. A gust of wind could mean an altered image. Clouds or rain impact the clarity and coloration of the image.
My work is about memory, about things lost and forgotten and reached toward, about erasure and resilience and something eternal. Cyanotype prints hint at an object, are created by an object, but exist in the absence of that object. They are an imprint. You might even say they’re a memory.
I recently returned from a week-long journey in Romania, culminating seven years of research and creative work about my Romanian Jewish ancestors who immigrated to Minneapolis at the turn of the 20th century. It started with a simple question - “Where in Romania did we come from?” My bubbe (Yiddish: grandmother) told me her aunt Ruth had told her once, but she forgot and she didn’t write it down. As I worked to recover this information, more questions emerged and took root in installation art, music, film and performance:
“How do we re-member what’s been forgotten?”
“Can anything truly be lost?”
“What if the fragments are enough?”
Pulling at the threads of family history, I unraveled more stories than I could have hoped to discover. Ruth had left a journal, and it was filled with treasure. Not only the name of the town where they had immigrated from, but the names of my great-great-great-great grandparents. Details about who they were and what they were like. A beautiful written portrait of her mother, my great-great grandmother who initiated the migration at the age of 18 with money she’d secretly saved from tips as a seamstress.
Even with all this new information, I had questions. What was the small town they left to escape pogroms? My great-great-great-great grandmother who died when her daughter was young - what was her name? Who are the women in the mourning portraits we have from 1900? And on.
For many years I’ve dreamt of visiting Romania, to see the land they called home, to feel it in my body, and to see if I could find any other trace of them and their stories. Half of my trip was in Galati, the town they left in 1902. The other half I spent in Neamt county, the area where my great-great-great grandmother was born in the mid-19th century. It was this time period that cyanotype printing was developed.
I didn’t find what I was looking for there, at least not directly. The Jewish community had no records of those buried in the cemetery before 1900, and the older graves were completely inaccessible, essentially jungle. Even if I were to take a saw and comb through the many rows of stones, even if I had time and ability to decipher the stones written entirely in Hebrew (including letters to indicate dates), it was unlikely the stones would be legible after all these years. Even if they were…I still didn’t know if this was even the right town, the right cemetery. My ancestor indicated she was born in Neamt - what does that mean? Piatra Neamt? Targu Neamt? Neamt County?
In Galati, I had the greatest hope of finding real tangible evidence of my family in this land. They left later, and I had names of ancestors who likely died there. I knew it was the right town to begin with! There had been a thorough record of the Jewish community with birth dates, circumcision and bar mitzvah dates, burials etc. but it was destroyed when the Nazis bombed the synagogue that housed it. Decades of neglect due to war and communism meant that here, too, the graves were inaccessible. And even if we could find them, my ancestors’ names were common enough that we couldn’t be sure if it was the right people. Part of why I was so hopeful to find those graves is that they often list the names of the deceased’s parents. And perhaps they would be buried next to other relatives whose names I could recover.
I found that war, scarcity of resources during communism, and the impacts of time and displacement had nearly erased all traces of my family in Romania. I had told myself I wouldn’t get my hopes up, but the truth is I was beyond disappointed. I was holding deep grief.
Rising global fascism and Israel’s escalating war on Gaza formed the backdrop of this trip. Israel and the US struck Iran while I was traveling, an event with many consequences including the silver lining that my cousin could join me in Galati because she was not able to return to Jerusalem where she was studying. I had spent a couple of days in Berlin before Romania, and was deeply disconcerted to find that my Jewish friends were already planning exit strategies as a neo-Nazi group rises in power. Simultaneously, they’re targeted for their work in support of Palestinian liberation. My first night in Romania, I had a guide for a walking tour of Brasov who parroted fascist propaganda and homophobic, transphobic ideas. And on that last day in Galati, I sat with the president of the Jewish community and his wife as they tried to impress upon me how naive I am as an American and how much the Jewish people need Israel and should support it no matter what. Over the past three weeks I had visited places like Andalusia (Spain) and Berlin, places where Jews had once thrived in cooperation and cultural integration with their neighbors. Places no one expected could give way to such violence and hatred, such brutal murder. And I had been to one of my people’s recent homelands, a place that allowed them to get by but never to thrive. Even when they escaped direct violence, they faced discriminatory laws and were denied citizenship (despite their compulsory army service). Though Romania’s participation in the Holocaust was less catastrophic than many other places, it still cut the Jewish population in half through murder and eventually to almost nothing through emigration.
All of this is to say, I became depressed. I was watching “my” people commit genocide livestreamed to my phone while antisemitism both rises and is falsely named and weaponized. My country is descending further into fascism than I ever believed possible, along with many others around the world. I couldn’t believe that humans have learned so little in the past 100 years. How could we choose this, again and again? What did that mean about my life? If those of us devoted to peace are almost never the ones with weapons, is there really a better future to fight for?
In the days after I returned to Minneapolis, never more grateful to call this land and these waters home, I began to see my quest for information differently. It hinged on obsession. Just one more generation of names. One more generation of records. One more piece of the puzzle. But in facing that for now the road is blocked and no more is available, I discovered something more important: my grief. Underneath that obsessive searching is a deep grief for the ruptures in my lineage, the erasure of our existence, the uncertainty of where we came from because it was so often necessary to keep migrating toward safety and prosperity and away from danger. My Jewish lineages show a remarkable contrast to my non-Jewish lineages from Norway and Scotland. I can say with relative certainty that my ancestors lived there at least 1000 years ago. I can trace names back to the 1500s with intact church records and family knowledge. I know the towns we lived in for centuries. When I make space to grieve the loss of this continuity and connection to my Jewish past, it becomes less and less important to find another piece of data. I recognize that one more generation of names will never satisfy the root cause of my pain.
These days I am less burdened by despair, in spite of the litany of disasters in our world. Even as I’ve spent blissful days at this residency, I’ve been reminded daily that Canada is on fire and Gaza is starving to death. But with the help of the natural world, my community and my teachers (especially Joanna Macy who passed at age 96 during my residency) I’ve recovered my will to work for a better world, regardless of the outcome. I may not live to see peace in the Middle East or a world that’s adapting meaningfully and responsibly to climate change, but I can devote my life to bringing that world about. Joanna Macy taught that even when we are in despair, we can connect with the renewable resource of our care for the world. We grieve and rage because we care. We still care. No one can take that away. “If we can’t save this world, we have to love it”, she said.
This trip was perhaps the end of a road in my research, coinciding with my bubbe’s rapid descent into dementia. As I make peace with what I have and what I don’t have, what I may never know, I revisit those original questions. I realize that my wholeness isn’t dependent on getting more information but on being with the lack of it and the grief that comes with it. This is part of my story too. “Lack of information is also information.” Absence itself has a substance that can be engaged with. At the same time I know this is not the end. Information and memory surface with their own intelligence and divine timing. And instead of looking backward, I’m looking side to side toward my living relatives and the stories they hold, including those I’ve never met. I know I have so much to give future generations to connect them to the past, and I’m honored to be in this present moment of the tapestry.