The Dairy Barn Arts Center is excited to present Transcending the Figure: Contemporary Ceramics. Curated by Tom Bartel, Assistant Professor of Fine Art at Ohio University, Transcending the Figure will broaden the viewers idea of what the figure can be. Don't miss this contemporary, cutting edge ceramics exhibit, which will feature approximately 70 artworks by 20 Ceramic Artists from across the country.
http://www.dairybarn.org/exhib

Upcoming Solo Exhibition at the Santiago Gallery, a nonprofit on-line art gallery dedicated to the promotion of international artists, catering to special events in support of ceramic art.
http://santiagogallery.wordpre

I am so excited to be in such a wonderful exhibition during NCECA. This show will challenging conventional notions of portraiture, the exhibition presents a select group of artists who use this genre to reveal the human condition and explore the multiple personality traits that comprise identity. I couldn't ask for better company, curated by Jo Lauria, and featuring Liz Zacher, Tanya Batura, Rebekah Bogard,Cynthia Consentino, Phyllis Green, Curt Lacross, Esther Shimazu, Kim Simonsson, Dirk Staschke, and Beth Cavener Stichter. If you find yourself in Philly please check this show out!
Opening Reception: Friday, March 12, 6:00-8:00 PM
NCECA Reception: Thursday, April 1, 5:00-8:00 PM
http://wayneart.org/exhibits/l

Tilting at Windmills, the upcoming exhibition at Gallery Gray, examines the efforts of artists working within the year long parameter of the 2009 time frame. Please check out this interesting exhibition online. I am also pleased to announce my gallery representation by Gallery Grey. http://www.gallery-gray.com/in

http://www.columbusalive.com/l Columbus Alive

Come out Sept 4, 2009 for the Columbus, Ohio Gallery Hop and opening of "Memorialize", a two person exhibition featuring my sculptures and photographs from artist Emily Hanako Momohara. The show will be at the Roy G Biv Gallery, 997 N High St in the gallery district. If you can't make it to the opening, the show will be up Sept 4- 26. We will be closing the show with a gallery talk on the 26th at 2:30
http://www.roygbivgallery.org/

I'm so proud to be a part of an exhibition with 11 Ohio University Alum! Thanks to Brad Schwieger and Shy Rabbit, this exhibition was possible. If you are in Pagosa Springs, Colorado June 20- August 1 check out the show!
http://www.shyrabbit.com/Exhib

Ceramics Monthly Emerging Artist 2009
http://ceramicartsdaily.org/ce

If you find yourself in Louisville, KY May 30- July 4 please stop by the Kentucky Museum of Arts and Craft to see my exhibition. Opening reception June 5, 6-9 http://www.kentuckyarts.org/Cu

http://leoweekly.com/ae/art-ki

May 30- Sept 7, 2010, Solo exhibition at the Florida Holocaust Museum in Tampa, Florida. Lecture and presentation details to follow. I am really looking forward to this show!
http://www.flhm2.org/

April- May 2010, I have been awarded a solo show for the Sculpture Center's emerging artist series for 2010. I'll keep you posted as details are given. Meanwhile, check out the Cleveland, Ohio Sculpture Center's website, it is a great resource for artists. sculpturecenter.org

May 2009 Society for Contemporary Craft, Pittsburgh, PA, LEAP Award Finalist Exhibition, Juried by Gail M. Brown May 11. View all finalists online at http://www.contemporarycraft.o

Featured LEAP artist for the month of July. My work will have a spotlight feature in the Society for Contemporary Craft's shop for the month.

May 1 - 31st, The Clay Studio, Philadelphia, PA "Small Favors IV, Invitational"
http://theclaystudio.org/exhib

April 14- 27, 2009 I will be exhibiting my MFA thesis show (dis)Placement. The opening reception will be April 17 from 7-9pm. Please join us for a cocktail and celebration. Ohio Univeristy Seigfred Art Gallery

“Clay & Context”; at University Art Gallery, Indiana State University Department of Art, Juried by Sherman Hall, January 15–February 6, 2009
http://www1.indstate.edu/artga

Date TBA, I will be presenting my lecture on the 3rd Generation Holocaust survivors in correlation with a solo exhibition of my sculptures. The event will take place in Indianapolis, IN. I will post the dates as soon as we have them pinned down.

If you are lucky enough to be in Helena, Montana in January, do not miss "Beyond the Brickyard". This exhibition is the Bray's first ever juried show. With Patti Warashina as the juror, I am sure that the show will not be one to miss. I am extremely honored to be a part of it!
http://archiebray.org/abf_exhi

If you find yourself in the Dayton, Ohio area November 2- Dec 12, please check out the HWD juried sculpture exhibition at the Rosewood Arts Centre Gallery. I'm excited to be a part of this exhibition that explores all mediums.
http://www.ketteringoh.org/new
http://template.daytondailynew

For anyone in the Indianapolis area October 12- November 17, check out the Urban MFA Exhibition at the Herron Gallery in Purdue University. This is a great exhibition that shows the artist's growth during graduate school. I will be showing the first piece that I made in grad school, "Falling Through the Phallic Stage" along with a later piece "Inherent Longing". There will also be other talented MFA students from universities in our region showing off their skills and progress.
http://www.herron.iupui.edu/

A portion of "Fractured Fairy Tale" will be on view at the New Hampshire Institute of Art's Ceramics Biennial from October 1st- November 12th. If you are in the Manchester or Boston area check out the show. I hear there are going to be many wonderful ceramic works!
http://www.nhia.edu/uploadcach

July 17th- 27th I will be in Lancaster, Ohio for the Lancaster Festival For The Arts where I have received the "Young Artist Fellowship" for 2008. If you are in the area please come out for great music, art and food. You can see the entire schedule for the festival at lanfest.org

July 20th 1:30- Please join us at the OUL Art Gallery for a panel discussion on women in the arts. The panel will consist of myself, and 3 other female artists and musicians.

On May 1st, 2008, I presented this lecture at Ohio University for the opening night of Holocaust Memorial Week...

Featured article in the Athens News
http://www.athensnews.com/news

Letter to the Editor for correction on misinterpretations
http://www.athensnews.com/opin

Ellie Weisel once said that an experience must be shared as an offering. As the granddaughter of a survivor I am here tonight to share my experience while offering forgiveness, hope, love and remembrance. While writing this lecture, It was difficult to find the right words to share with all of you. I wanted to find words that offer enlightenment, poetic wisdom, and that communicate an all-inspiring desire to change the world. After many drafts of fragmented thoughts and quotes from other poets and philosophers, I came to the conclusion that sadly, I am not a poet, or a philosopher, I am just a person with a story that I feel is important to share.

One of the reasons that I struggled so much with how to begin my story is because of the love and respect that I have for my grandmother. I want to deliver her story with great respect and I worried about how I would do that. I know however that I have to tell her story and my story with honesty. You see, this is very difficult for me because the memories I have of my grandmother are not all fond ones. In fact many memories that I have of her are quite painful. In my studies of trauma and holocaust survivors, I have learned that there are many different kinds of survivors: there are those that learn to appreciate everything and everyone that comes into there lives, those that just move on, and those that have been made numb by their experience. My grandmother was one of those who went numb. The greatest tragedy that the Nazi’s committed against my nana was robbing her of the ability to truly and fully attach herself to love.

Nana was nineteen years old when she was sent to Auschwitz; she had never been to a proper wedding or a funeral. What would have been the celebration of her marriage to my grandfather, ended up as a separation; her introduction to death was through the mass murder of strangers and of those whom she loved dearly. In watching this video of nana telling her story, you can see the light turn off inside of her the moment she tells of her arrival in Auschwitz. Then there are many missing fragments of her story, where she speaks of losing her mind, and having no memory of what happened during that time. I can only imagine what she has blocked out. She remembers her childhood with fondness: she lived in a picturesque town in Hungary, she adored her family, especially her father, she had wonderful friends, but she was also very sheltered. She did not really know what was happening to the Jews until she heard the German tanks rumbling down her street and as she and her father stood on their balcony and he told her “the German’ s are here, that’s the end of us”

She remembers the ghetto and the opera that was sung by the canter every Sunday, a song that she could not listen to the rest of her life without tears, she remembers her favorite teacher who was crippled from polio lying naked in a barn next to his wheelchair that was dismantled by the Nazis. He begged my nanna to bring him poison so that he could kill himself before they did, she did not bring him poison, and they did kill him. She remembers her uncle Marti Bachii being beaten on the soles of his feet and dying from a stroke in her lap on the trains to Auschwitz; she remembers his blue hand that kept falling from the blanket it was wrapped in and how she had to keep tucking it away. She remembers the last time she saw her father before he jumped from the train. How he told her and her mother not to volunteer for anything and then he was gone, forever. She remembers bits and pieces of her arrival, the slop that they were fed every morning, the first time that she saw the sign that read “gas chamber.” She remembers sitting in a corner of the barracks in a piece of fabric that she tied around her like a diaper, half naked, staring off into space and seeing her mother fight like a tiger to bring her water, then blackness. She remembers when she and her mother were chosen to be sent to a labor camp, then finally, liberation.

Trauma occurs when your brain cannot fit or comprehend the information that it is bearing witness to. As a result it keeps coming back in different forms, trying to fit itself neatly into the psyche, but there is no way for this amount of trauma to fit. It is blocked, lost forever, and can sometimes never have a true witness.

Second Section of DVD

After the war my grandparents were reunited. My grandfather had lost every single person in his family. My grandmother and her mother were all he had left of his identity before the war and none of them wanted to remember what they had been through. They all agreed that the past should be left as the past, not spoken of; they needed to live for the future and speak only of the future.

They moved to a small town in Virginia, changed their last name to Collin, started attending a Baptist church and began rebuilding their new life, new family, and new identity. As my grandmother says, “we just wanted to blend into the wallpaper.”

Slide “Loud Whisper”-

In this attempt to blend in, they decided that it would be best to not tell their children of their history until they felt that they could handle it. So my mother and her brother were raised in a house that resonated with an untold fear and anxiety. My grandparents stuffed memories of all that they witnessed and all those things that they had never grieved in every corner of the house. These hidden memories manifested into an inability to cope with the love that they felt for their own children. They knew all too well the possibility of losing everything. The only way that they knew how to cope, and to live with the idea of losing again, was to shut off the intimate bond that a parent should have with their children.

My grandparents finally told my mother and her brother in secrecy of their being Jewish and of their parent's experience during the holocaust when my mom was sixteen. My mother says that all she could do was weep uncontrollably. After that day, they were not to speak of it again.


The sculptures that I make are driven by a desire to investigate how an individual’s personal history affects their identity, behavior, and actions. I am especially interested in intergenerational trauma and how a person’s past, particularly a past that has been interrupted or scarred by a traumatic event such as war, can influence patterned behaviors that pass through the family. When the effects of trauma are passed on from parent to child it is called intergenerational trauma. When these patterned behaviors have no memory to recall the source of familial trauma, when one is unable to access the pain of a troubled past, the problems they cause become extremely difficult to deal with. The result can be great pain, confusion, fear, anxiety, and in turn the problems become the inheritance of another generation. The point is – the damage of trauma can be far reaching.


My grandmother’s inability to show love or speak of love made it very difficult for my mother to do the same. Love was always surrounded by fear and anxiety. My grandmother never told my mother or myself that she loved us. My mother did not tell me until I was 15; I remember that day very well.

Needless to say, my grandparent’s repressed memories became manifest in fear and anxiety, which were passed on to my mother, and in turn, passed on to me. It could go on, but I will not let it.

Slide- Inherent Longing

In trying to understand the intense desire to create a family without possessing the emotional ability to be a nurturing parent, I created this piece “Inherent Longing”. While making this piece I was thinking about the great responsibility and power of being a parent or a leader. It is a position that calls one to be nurturing. But what if one, as an adult feels, and perhaps has always felt that they hadn’t been nurtured? I thought about the natural desire of both the parent and child in need of nurturing and neither able to give it to the other. What happens with the realization that neither parent nor children are receiving what they need? Can they re-learn their way out of this situation?

I was a very anxious child. I had a terrible fear of being separated from my parents, or of something horrible happening to them. I remember when I was about 8, pacing back and forth in the front yard for hours, crying because my dad was late coming home and I was terrified something awful had happened to him. I consistently had nightmares of war. I would dream that I would look out my window and see tanks rolling down my street, in the dream I would scream and cry and run to my mom and say, you said this could never happen here, and she would tell me, it can always happen.


The reason this is so fascinating to me now, is because at the time, I had no clue of my grandparent’s history. Just like my mother and my uncle, I was not told of my family’s history, or of being Jewish until I was sixteen, and I too was told to keep it a secret for fear that people may look at me differently. The fact is that this secret was so palpable in our house that it was passed through 3 generations in the form of fear that it came into my dreams as a child, as if it was screaming to be set free!


I was a bit of a rebellious kid, so the fact that my mother told me not to tell anyone that I was Jewish really didn’t mean that much to me. For the first time in my life, I was able to grasp an understanding of the way that my nana treated me, and because of knowing this secret, I was able to love her more. For the first time in my life, I was swelling with pride for where I had come from.

So I began to test the waters with people’s reactions to my telling them that my grandparents were Jewish and survivors. Many were surprised and many more were interested in the stories. I just couldn’t understand the shame and guilt that my grandparent’s and my mom had around our history.

As I began to tell people, and people would ask questions, I very quickly learned that I had no answers to their questions. I would ask my mother for stories, but she really did not know much, and I was too afraid to ask my grandmother. I didn’t want to disturb her reality that she was living in now. I was very scared of upsetting her by probing her with questions of a past that she very obviously wanted to leave behind. My brother was the brave one who began to ask questions. It was always easier for him to talk to her than it was for me and to my surprise; she slowly started to give us bits and pieces.

As she slowly gifted us with her stories, softness that I had never seen her wear began to show through. She began to want to speak and she realized the importance of her speaking.

Insert slide of “Roots”

As with many people towards the end of their life, if they are lucky, they are able to see for the first time what they have missed, and they are given a chance to have it one last time. I was lucky to get to see my grandmother before she passed, and I’ll never forget what she said to me when I saw her. She took my face in her hands, and she told me, “Bimbilie, I guess I will not get to see your wedding after all”. I can not explain to you the heartbreak that I felt at that moment, because I knew that her telling me that was her way of telling me for the first time that she loved me and that she could see in my face that I had learned to love for our family again. I also knew that it meant that she was going to leave me, and she had just started to see me clearly.

After my grandmother passed, my mother went to clean out her apartment and beside her bed she found a book about how to love. When I think of my nana, in her apartment in Toronto, alone, suffering with the fact that she had moved herself away from those who loved her, and trying to relearn how to love them, I am filed with such a great sadness, and such a great regret that she did not try to do this work sooner. But most of all, I am filled with a great anger that in our world the atrocities of genocide can occur and that those who survive are left to suffer in confusion. I missed out on so much of my nana, and she missed out on so much love, because her ability to love was robbed from her.

All people deserve love, and I tell my nana’s story as a reminder of what can happen when we try to escape from our memory. We must remember and continue telling the stories of our grandparents, through our art, poetry, literature, teaching, any way that we know how, not only to heal our own families, but as a constant reminder that genocide can, and genocide is happening. It is clear that the world has not absorbed the lessons of the holocaust, so we must keep reminding the world because, as Ellie Weisel once said, “In remembrance lies the seed of transformation and renewal. Our words have the power to prevent one’s past from becoming another’s future.”