Virtual Events - Kupferberg Holocaust Center

Join us for a poetry reading with acclaimed poets Julia Kolchinsky and Luisa Muradyan, who came to the United States from Ukraine in the 90’s as Jewish refugees and are both descendants of Holocaust survivors. They will share work from their books PARALLAX and I Make Jokes When I’m Devastated, which deal with raising children under the shadow of intergenerational trauma and the war against Ukraine. They will also read from their forthcoming collaborative collection, When The World Stopped Touching, an unfiltered account of mothering young children through quarantine written during the pandemic. 

Join Dare Turner (Yurok Tribe), Curator of Indigenous Art at the Brooklyn Museum, for a discussion about the practice of community representation, engagement, and dialogue through the curation of historical and contemporary Native art in encyclopedic museums. Turner will address the concept of "curation as care" as it relates to her recent projects and her role in stewarding the Brooklyn Museum's Indigenous art collection. She will also speak about the exhibition initiative she co-curated with Leila Grothe at the Baltimore Museum of Art entitled “Preoccupied: Indigenizing the Museum,” the reinstallation of the Brooklyn Museum's American Art wing, and her collaboration with museum professionals and Indigenous knowledge keepers alike.

August 1940. In New York, the Emergency Rescue Committee forms to save European artists blacklisted by Hitler. But who will go to southern France to find the artists and do the rescuing? Enter Varian Fry, a New York journalist with deep knowledge of the European political situation but zero experience saving high profile would-be emigrés. How did Fry end up in this vital and delicate position? How did he find the artists on his list? Where did the artists hide while they awaited visas, and how did Fry help them negotiate the tangled red tape of wartime immigration? How did Fry's time in Marseille affect the rest of his life? In this presentation, novelist and professor Julie Orringer will take you on a virtual journey to wartime Marseille and show you how one daring American achieved the impossible: the saving of more than two thousand artists, including Marc Chagall, Max Ernst, André Breton, Hannah Arendt, and many others.