Yonia Fain’s Map of Refugee Modernism | A project with artist Yevgeniy Fiks

Feb 23 to March 19 | Harry Wood Gallery

Artist lecture | March 18 | 10 to 11:30 a.m.

Closing reception | March 18 | 5 to 7 p.m.

Starting in the nineteenth century, millions of Jews left Eastern Europe. Whether they escaped pogroms or sought new economic and educational opportunities abroad, the generation of Jewish artists who grew out of this migration lived simultaneously in the world of Yiddish culture and the emerging world of modernism. Later, in the twentieth century, the careers of Eastern European artists deeply connected to Yiddish culture were cut short by the Holocaust; many of those who survived became refugees.

“Yonia Fain’s Map of Refugee Modernism” explores one chapter in the peripatetic biography of modernist painter and Yiddish writer Yonia Fain (1913–2013). During the Second World War, Fain fled Eastern Europe to Asia to escape Nazi persecution, but was forced to live in Shanghai for the duration of the war. Later Fain moved to Mexico City, where he was befriended by luminaries in the Mexican art world, represented the country abroad and exhibited his work in the Palacio de Bellas Artes. Fain’s time in Mexico City is chronicled in this exhibition, including his since destroyed mural for the Memorial Chapel in the Panteón Israelita at the Cementerio Ashkenazi, which has been reimagined for this exhibition by Phoenix-based painter Rachel Kornovich.

Part of a series on art histories of Yiddishland developed by Yevgeniy Fiks, "Yonia Fain’s Map of Refugee Modernism” intervenes in national art-historical narratives. Yiddishland is not a state and may be something more or less than a nation: even as these artists possess profound connections to Yiddish literature and culture, their national, ethnic and cultural identities remain unresolved (as in the hyphenated description of Fain as Lithuanian-Jewish-Mexican-American, and so on). Rooted in Yiddish-ness, working and living in at least two languages and traversing several countries and even continents, these artists radically expand our understanding of modernism.

Publication

“Reflections on Refugee Modernisms”

Edited by Chelsea Haines

Featuring contributions by Fiona Gray, Kathryn Hunter, Jillian Joiner, Gabriella Jording, Mehrdad Mirzaie, Morgan Rumsey, Jordan Tanguay, Yihan Yu and Koni Zhang.

Published on the occasion of "Yonia Fain's Map of Refugee Modernism," this edited volume includes new scholarship from graduate and undergraduate students in the seminar Refugee Modernism(s) taught by Chelsea Haines in Fall 2025. From reflections on the Armenian Genocide’s imprint on Arshile Gorky’s work to Japanese American women’s craft practices during internment, and from photography and displacement in post-Katrina New Orleans to current experiments in virtual reality and Holocaust memory in an emerging post-witness era, these essays intervene decisively in art-historical narratives that privilege the nation-state and its citizens. Collectively, they foreground artists who were migrants, exiles, colonial subjects, or internally displaced—figures whose histories have often been obscured or flattened to sustain settled narratives of artistic, historical, or national meaning.

This exhibition is presented in collaboration with "Art Workshop: Crossing Borders: Jewish Art, Literature and Migration in the Americas” and the “Books from Yiddishland(s): The History of Yiddish as a Migrant Language, Culture, and Art” featured collection at the Hayden Library.

“Yonia Fain’s of Refugee Modernism” is curated by Dr. Chelsea Haines with curatorial assistance by Mehrdad Mirzaie and Ninabah Winton. This project is supported by an HIDA subvention grant and Jewish Studies at ASU.

Gallery Hours

Monday – Thursday | 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Fridays | 9 a.m. to 3 p.m.

Closed on weekends and university holidays