OHRA 1989

Plac Wolności w Krakowie: Freedom Square, Krakow, Poland

Art: Undated, probably ca. 1989
Media: Ink, colored pencil, crayon, litho crayon on aluminum lithographic plate.
Framed, 26 in. H x 37 W

In September 1985 I spent two weeks in a dorm room for Music Conservatory and Academy of Fine Arts students in Krakow. I subsequently left Poland a week later after failed attempts to find out why my post-graduate fellowship at the Academy of Fine Arts vanished between the time I left Poland in August, following the summer session, and my return in early Sept to begin the academic art as a grad student at the academy.

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A Polish academic friend suggested I was a victim of poor Polish - American relations at the time. Poland was still suffering from repression following the crushing of the Solidarnosc (Solidarity) trade movement a few years prior.

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Another theory, one of my own, was that my having told a Polish student,  in the dormitory where the foreign summer studies students were housed, that I had made an artwork in 1982 portraying Lech Walesa, the leader of the Solidarity movement, might've cost m my residency

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How? It was said that among the Polish students living in the dorm, serving as "pilots," or guides, were some who were working for Polish intelligence. Comparably, it was said that among American students (who were of all ages, college students to seniors) there were some who were doing simple intelligence gathering for the US, meaning simply observing (as opposed to James Bond cloak & dagger spying).

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The artwork I refer to, The Prisoner of Conscience: Dedicated to Lech Walesa and Solidarity, was exhibited in a national exhibition sponsored by the (late) West (law) Pub. Co, St Paul, Minnesota, and held at the Landmark Center, St Paul, 1982. The work was published in the West '82/ Art & the Law exhibit catalog.

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During my two week stay at the dorm, I learned the building had been a Gestapo (Third Reich, Nazi) torture center during the years of the Nazi Austrian-German occupation (1939-44). Later, during the Communist era, it was a police and torture center at some point.

Every few days someone placed fresh flowers in the facade at the front of the dorm building - in remembrance of someone tortured, and probably murdered, there.