Lisa Rosowsky is a mixed-media artist and designer, as well as a design educator at Massachusetts College of Art and Design, the country’s oldest independent college of art and design. She received
her AB from Harvard College, and her MFA from Yale University, and lives and works in the Boston area.
ARTIST’S STATEMENT
Much of my work was initially centered on my experience as the daughter of a “hidden child” and refugee from the Holocaust. Second-generation themes of repression and loss came up again and again as I sifted through memories and stories about a family decimated by the war. I work in a variety of media, but am especially attracted to fabric. The translucency of silk, voile or gauze, and the images seen both on or through the cloth, is for me like the transience of memory, and the fading into history of the few remaining people who can speak of their first-hand experiences of that time in history.
In recent years, my work examines the rise of antisemitism—and bias and hate more generally—both in the United States and abroad.
As a visual artist, I call myself “media agnostic” because the concept comes first, and this determines the media required to tell the story I want to tell, although fabric remains central to my work.
My father’s mother, Tamara, was one of eleven children born to an educated Jewish family which emigrated from Russia to Europe during the Russian Revolution. She married in France and had a son, my father, who was five years old when he witnessed from his window a column of German tanks rolling into Lille. The family moved to Paris. Synagogues were bombed, Jewish-owned businesses were summarily transferred to non-Jews, and by 1942 all Jews in Paris were ordered to wear the yellow Star of David badge. With only a few hours’ warning of their arrest, my grandparents were able to arrange for their son to be taken by non-Jewish friends—then they were swept up with 13,000 other Parisian Jews and held in the city’s Velodrome d’Hiver (a winter sports arena).
Nearly 30,000 Jews were deported from Paris in that year alone, most to Auschwitz-Birkenau. My grandparents were among them. Five out of the eleven siblings were killed at Auschwitz, along with their spouses and, in most cases, their children. My father, one of the so-called “hidden children” of this era, was eventually sent to the United States to be raised by his aunt Raya, who died at the age of 101. The last of the original Raitzyn siblings, Raya bequeathed to me, among other things, her collection of gloves—which became the impetus for “The Raitzyns” and launched me into an intensive period of work focused on memory, memorials, and lost family.