In an untitled landscape Ceija Stojka made in 1995, the sunset lights up an Austrian lake. Her family’s traveling wagon is on the water and her kin is around the perimeter gazing at the scenery and fishing. Thick brushstrokes of acrylic on paper emphasize the immediacy of the idyllic memory. Throughout her memoirs, including The Memoirs of Ceija Stojka, Child Survivor of the Romani Holocaust, posthumously translated in 2022, Stojka equates the Romani tradition of living in horse-drawn wagons with natural splendor — sleeping outside, enjoying vistas, and hearing birds chirp — manifesting the culture’s spirit of independence. Wagons themselves are a key symbol of sovereignty; the wheel even appears on the Romani flag.
On view at the Drawing Center, Ceija Stojka: Making Visible showcases her self-taught practice and outsider perspective, both in the art world and as a Romani woman in Europe, through over 50 paintings and drawings. Like some of the best artists of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, Stojka, who passed away in 2013 at age 79, worked across media — poetry, painting, writing, performance, and music. Her work is evidence that the core of creativity lies not in institutional education — she attended formal schooling only briefly as a child — but in the capacity to convey complex personal experience. As Roma writer and scholar Cristiana Grigore, a contributor for this magazine who was a consultant for the exhibition, told me, “She didn’t need permission or validation that usually comes with being officially called an artist. She just had the desire to express herself with the instruments she had.”
An Austrian Romani child survivor of the Holocaust, her art also made the atrocities inflicted on her people publicly visible, raising awareness of the richness of their culture as well as the centuries of persecution that persist today. In the late 1980s, she became the first Romani-Austrian woman to recount her experience of the Holocaust, though she initially faced resistance from her own historically patriarchal and insular community. Through her paintings, she rejected fascism not only by depicting what she endured but also by embracing freedom, underscored by tender examinations of everyday Romani life. What she accomplishes is more than a reminder to never forget history: It is a painstaking argument for the value of remembering, at both the personal and collective levels.
In 1933, Stojka was born into a Lovara family, one of five ethnic Romani groups in Austria during the early 20th century; as a whole, they currently number approximately 10 to 12 million people across Europe with many diverse subgroups, customs, and languages. Across these varied backgrounds, a common thread is centuries of persecution stretching back to the Holy Roman Empire in the 1500s — which continues despite the efforts of advocacy groups, whose work intensified in the aftermath of the Holocaust, which killed an estimated 500,000 Romani people.
Damaging stereotypes accompany this systematic oppression, including a notion of “gypsy life” as synonymous with exoticized mystery, vagrancy, and danger. Stojka and her family led a peripatetic life throughout Austria, a lifestyle that declined throughout the 20th century, but the richness of the experiences she affectionately documented in paintings and memoirs dismantles such tropes.
In 1941, when Stojka was around eight years old, her father was arrested and taken to a camp in Dachau, where he was later murdered. She and the rest of her family were taken to Auschwitz two years later. Her sense of loss and confusion during this time is suggested by another untitled 1995 painting depicting the same body of water as the aforementioned painting, Lake Neusiedel, at the border between Austria and Hungary. But in this scene, set in winter, the lake is placid, and objects are scattered outside a cluster of abandoned caravans beside a Nazi flag buried in the snow, a clear reference to the Gestapo rounding up Romani.
The artist’s description of her two years across Auschwitz, Ravensbrück, and Bergen-Belsen as a child in her memoirs is devastating: the constant presence of death, incessant physical and verbal abuse, starvation, and unbearable labor. In one poem, Stojka writes, “My fear stayed in auschwitz / and in the camps. / Auschwitz is my overcoat / Bergen-Belsen is my dress / And Ravensbrück is my undershirt / What should I be afraid of?”
Her drawings are the visual manifestation of her words. “Sad Earth” (1998) renders a mass arrival of prisoners to Auschwitz, bodies clustered together as a series of long green lines, suffering in the winter. Here and elsewhere, the rendering of figures loosely, almost abstractly, is a critical tool for the artist to emphasize the trauma of her experience.
One of the most unsettling images of Stojka's oeuvre, the watercolor-on-paper work “They Devoured Us” (1995), frames the face of a Nazi officer with bloodshot eyes, his mouth gaping horrifically with blood spurting out of it. The painting embodies the term porajmos, coined by activists with the dual meaning of “the devouring” and “the destruction,” to reference the Romani Holocaust.
“Untitled” (1999), meanwhile, layers emaciated, wraithlike bodies holding red bowls of soup. Their compressed bodies, brownish skin marked with black lines, and gaunt extremities expose the destitution of the camps. A small tree branch, which frequently accompanies Stojka’s signature, grows from the lower right-hand corner of this composition, referencing a small deciduous tree that her family found at Bergen-Belsen and used for sustenance right before they were liberated. Visiting the camp back in the early 2000s, Stojka actually found and reunited with the tree that literally saved her family — again, nature provided.
While Stojka’s artistic and advocacy work in the aftermath of the Holocaust certainly was critical, it is important to note that she also lived an expansive, vigorous life afterward. This included re-enrolling in school to achieve full literacy, raising three children, and negotiating a country that continued to hold deep prejudices against the Romani. In fact, Stojka only began painting late in life, while spending time with her grandchildren. They would do arts and crafts together; informal experimentation eventually turned into a full-time practice. “I can’t help but stop and think about the fact that she was inspired by her grandchildren and the tools that were available to them,” Grigore reflected. “She had the freedom within herself, and the courage, to not say to herself ‘I’m too old to do this.’”
Stojka’s visual and writing practices evidence the artist as a polymath, a maker capable of implementing different media to achieve a cohesive and massive body of work for us to interpret. But as Grigore puts it, “She has a very meaningful message to share with the world; the focus is on the message itself, and not on the medium, whether we call it storytelling, music, painting, or poetry.” That message — that art is essential to preserving both individual and collective memory in the service of better futures — is evident in the expressive, enduring, and consequential works she left behind.
Ceija Stojka: Making Visible continues at the Drawing Center (35 Wooster Street, Soho, Manhattan) through June 7. The exhibition was curated by Lynne Cooke with Noelig Le Roux.
