The exhibition, titled Forms of Presence: Art of Lemkos/Carpatho-Ruthenians, opens on Saturday at the State Ethnographic Museum in Warsaw and runs through June 30.
Curator Michał Szymko, who is a Lemko, said the show is meant to bring a long-marginalized minority into Poland’s museum mainstream.
He described Lemko art as rooted in the icon and Eastern Christian church traditions, and said it also includes modern currents such as abstract expressionism, feminist threads and politically engaged work.
“Our art was deprived of a guarantee of safety,” Szymko said, pointing to the legacy of Operation Vistula, a 1947 communist-era forced resettlement that scattered Lemkos and other Ukrainian and Ruthenian communities from southeastern Poland to the country’s north and west.
He said the policy disrupted the passing on of identity across generations, yet the community endured and continues to create.
The exhibition is organized into three sections, “Memory: Wandering Roots,” “Identity: Echo of the Carpathians,” and “Transpop: Heritage in Transformation,” and combines well-known names with artists who have rarely been shown in major institutions.
Warhol’s presence is framed through family history rather than pop art’s usual themes.
The museum is showing his work through his relationship with his mother, Julia Warhola, a Lemko who emigrated to the United States in 1921, herself an illustrator and calligrapher.
“We did not want to show him in the context of capitalism, pop art, and America,” Szymko said, adding that the focus is Warhol’s ethnic roots and the influence of his mother.
Alongside Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe, the museum is displaying two screenprints from the Space Fruits series, Pears and Watermelon, as well as a Mother and Child drawing and a film poster for Andy Warhol’s Dracula.
The Warhol works are accompanied by family memorabilia and photographs. Szymko said the display creates “a meeting of Andy and his mom,” whom he described as a major influence on his work.
He also pointed to a religious thread, saying Warhol absorbed his mother’s church life and stories of saints, which later shaped how he portrayed American celebrities. In that context, the museum places Warhol’s Marilyn alongside a 16th-century icon of St. Nicholas.
The exhibition also features works by Epifaniusz Drowniak, known as Nikifor, a self-taught painter considered a master of naïve art, and by Jerzy Nowosielski, a leading modernist known for painting and sacred art.
It also highlights younger artists, including Dawid Zdobylak, whose work addresses intergenerational trauma and questions of identity.
The museum said an additional room, described as a surprise until Saturday, will include Dorota Nieznalska’s monumental work Violence and Memory.
Szymko said the exhibition’s central message is “Let’s get to know each other,” and he argued that minority cultures are too often spoken for by the majority, adding that the accompanying education program is designed to give Lemkos space to speak in their own voice.
(rt/gs)
Source: PAP
Click on the audio player above for a report by Michał Owczarek.