Jenny Yurshansky, Upper and Middle School Art Teacher at Westridge, has created a new exhibition called “A Legacy Of Loss: There Were No Roses There.” that tells her personal story as a Jewish refugee from the Soviet Union.
The exhibition, located at the American Jewish University (AJU) in Los Angeles, is open from January 30, 2022 to May 12, 2022. After being postponed for nearly two years during the pandemic, it is the first gallery exhibition at the university since the pandemic started, currently open for viewing by email reservation to limit overcrowding. Yurshansky’s exhibition explores the generational trauma that she and her family experienced after leaving the Soviet Union and invites viewers to explore their own family and individual stories. “For the last few years, I’ve decided to be more transparent and vulnerable and speak more close to home as to how [the immigrant story] is my story too,” Yurshansky explained.
The exhibition consists of several installations including a quilt making project, a project created from fences and metal roses, smaller embroideries, a fortune teller (and students drawings), and a plant-related project. Yurshansky’s pieces focus around the theme of immigration, relating to her personal life as a woman born stateless in Rome. Her family, who fled Soviet-era Moldova before she was born, inspired her exhibition and story. “I’m Jewish and that’s my family’s background, and because that was a very dangerous thing to be recognized as, it’s taken me until now to be comfortable about sharing that openly,” Yurshansky said.
The first and largest artwork in the exhibition strikes the eye immediately. A towering 9 foot by 12 foot quilt called “Patching and Discovering Our Routes Home,” sewn by Yurshansky and her mother, tells the story of Yurshansky’s personal life and background.
Yurshansky’s grandmother, who was a gifted seamstress, taught Yurshansky and her mother sewing. Yurshansky and her mother had always loved the activity, and Yurshansky used her large quilt project as an opportunity to spend time with her mother and talk about her family’s history and experience as a new parent without a country to call home.
“My mother will never directly answer my questions about the past. I have found that in the hours we spend sewing and sitting together through silences, sharing the frustrations and rewards of intricate embroidering and large-scale pieces, allows a space for memories to bubble up and come to the surface,” said Yurshansky in a Los Angeles Times Article.
After her family fled to Rome from the Soviet Union, Yurshansky explained, “We hadn’t been accepted anywhere yet as asylum seekers. [We were] very much an unknown.” This feeling of being an “unknown” and not knowing much about her history inspired her exhibition. Yurshansky wanted to create an entire experience that tells her life story.
My work as a practice has dealt with migration–the idea of borders and who belongs and who doesn’t." - Jenny Yurshansky
Yurshansky made the large scale quilt project with the help of students during workshops at the American Jewish University, allowing the young Jewish students to explore their own cultures and family stories through art. The university writes in the project description, “Their familial stories, which traverse the globe from Iran to New York, were expressed through collages, images, and narratives folded into playful shapes of fortune-tellers. Yurshansky has transformed these small crafted sculptures into the piece Unfolded Narratives, a large-scale quilt reminding us that all our stories are connected and pieced together.”
The project started when Yurshansky brought her mother back to Moldova–which was a part of the Soviet Union–for the first time since the family had left. Yurshansky had only been able to convince her mother to join her for two short trips back because of the traumatic memories and difficulties her mother faced seeing her home again. Sometimes, Yurshansky found that her mother couldn’t even recognize places because they had been buried so deeply in her mind. “Some things, even though they were physically all there, [my mother] honestly couldn’t see it–she couldn’t recognize it until someone else confirmed for her that that’s what she was looking at,” said Yurshansky.
Although it was a difficult process, Yurshansky took advantage of long periods of quiet time to talk to her mother who slowly opened up their family’s past. In making this space for her mother and family to heal, Yurshansky was inspired to create more spaces for healing and conversation for people in different communities who also had traumatic experiences.
“Because [immigrant stories] are very painful topics, my family has not wanted to talk about it with me, and that’s part of what I’m bringing to the surface: just how difficult it is to have these conversations. And that’s why people don’t have them, frankly,” said Yurshanksy. One of the largest goals of the exhibition was to create a space for these conversations and reflections in her exhibition.
Inside the exhibition space itself, an “echo” of a carpet remains stained on the walls. “It is a very traditional thing where my family is from to have woven carpets on the walls, on the floors, everywhere, because they insulate the room and also they help with [blocking] sound in the neighboring walls,” said Yurshansky. Using this notion of the importance of the carpet in Russian culture, Yurshansky has been able to express her inner feelings, emphasizing her family’s experience leaving the Soviet Union–now Russia–behind.
In her project “There Were No Roses There (Echo),” she was able to connect with her viewer in a more quiet, personal way. “I know that the topics that I deal with are quite heavy so I feel like I need to balance that,” said Yurshansky. She wanted to create a quiet space for conversations in her artwork, to give people time to think about their identity and open up to the past.
Another project, called “Blacklisted: A Planted Allegory Audio Guide,” focuses on the stories of the plants in the sculpture garden in the university campus surroundings. The project was part of a larger, more long-term project she started in 2012, which shared immigrant and refugee stories. Yurshansky highlights the work of immigrants and plants from other countries in America, and shows how people are discarded like the plants when they have finished their “jobs” in a country.
“[The plants] have been what is called “blacklisted”, which means they’ve been named as dangerous–too productive, too prolific, they might take over the landscape–very similar to how immigrants are talked about too,” said Yurshansky. She explained that her audio guide featured these stories. “You can listen to the plants telling you stories from their perspective of what it means to be an immigrant here to the U.S., or specifically to California, because they all arrived from somewhere else.”
Yurshansky asked a few actors to choose the story of the plant that they most identified with and record their voices in any form that they wanted to. Finding some blacklisted plants on campus, Yurshansky created an audio guide for the American Jewish University. “[The plants] relate their own narratives of how they arrived, or their opinion of being here, what it feels like to be named as undesirable, but being thought of as beautiful and wonderful at one point in time,” said Yurshansky. Arts at AJU wrote an article about the project, called “Blacklisted, A Planted Allegory: Stories By The Community,” exploring two plants and their stories.
Throughout her exhibition, Yurshansky aims to address the larger immigrant story. “Rather than the work being explicitly about my family story, I’m trying to make a larger context for understanding what it means to go through this process for any asylum seeker, or any refugee, or any immigrant,” said Yurshansky. She wants to bring to the surface that everyone, especially in America, has a background story. “We all arrived from somewhere, somehow, somewhen,” Yurshansky said.
“I feel that a lot of our troubles around immigration or the divisiveness of who belongs and who doesn’t…or a lack of empathy and lack of understanding is because people haven't thought enough about where they came from and who had to make that sacrifice along the way." - Jenny Yurshansky
In sharing her own story, Yurshansky hopes to provide a space for others to tell their individual stories and explore their family stories. “Part of it [making the conversation] is also trying to figure out how to make these safe spaces or safe experiences within which to have these kinds of conversations, and actually have healing as well.”
For more information:
To schedule a viewing, email arts@aju.edu.