Yonia Fain’s Map of Refugee Modernism | A project with artist Yevgeniy Fiks
Feb 23 to March 19 | Harry Wood Gallery
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 poet Yonia Fain (1913–2013). During the Second World War, Fain fled Eastern Europe to Asia to escape Nazi persecution, only to be relocated to the Shanghai Ghetto. After the war, Fain lived in Mexico City from 1947 until 1953, 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.
This exhibition is accompanied by “Reflections on Refugee Modernism(s),” a compilation of new scholarship by students in the Fall 2025 Art History seminar on the same topic, who explore how paths of forced migration have shaped modern and contemporary art globally.
“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.
This exhibition is presented in collaboration with "Art Workshop: Crossing Borders: Jewish Art, Literature and Migration in Latin America and the Caribbean.”
Image: Yevgeniy Fiks, “Yonia Fain's Map of Refugee Modernism,” 2019–2022. Courtesy the artist.
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