OLA RONDIAK: WOMEN’S HISTORY, A HUNDRED YEARS OF UKRAINE

In the days preceding the Russian invasion of her country on February 19, 2022, Ola Rondiak was protesting outside of the United Nations’ New York Headquarters. The next day, she was in Washington D.C. with the same battlecry: "Peace for Ukraine". Anxious and terrified, Rondiak was rallying not only for her country, but for her husband, Petro, who was residing in the capital, Kyiv, at the time. In the days that followed, her family’s reunion remained precarious at best, threatened by the onset of war, she told CBS News.

A month later on March 19, 2022, I had the chance to dine with Rondiak at THE GALLERY, odo, an authentic Japanese restaurant on 17 W 20th St., New York, where CEO and Master Chef Hiroki Odo will host Rondiak's solo show in support of Ukraine. During our conversation, I could sense a desperate urgency in her voice – wartime cruelty was quickly escalating, but her staff, as well as 150 pieces of her art, were stranded in her Ukrainian studio. Her only kernel of hope lay in the fact that her husband found safety at a hotel in Warsaw, from which he continues to support the Ukrainian war effort. 

Agonized by yet another invasion of Ukrainian soil, Rondiak exclaimed, “Over a hundred years, our culture was destroyed as many as four times!” There were two Soviet invasions and one by Nazi Germany during the Second World War, followed by the Russian invasion which began in 2014 and became a full-scale war in 2022. Informed by the historical context of Ukraine, Rondiak’s art investigates national tragedy through maternal lineage and immigration within the personal sphere.

Russian military forces are upheaving Rondiak’s family, but this wouldn’t be the first time. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine during World War II left her maternal grandmother Paraskevia Michniak alone to care for her sick daughter while her family fled to western Europe. On March 28th, 1947, the NKVD arrested Paraskevia, charged her with collusion, and sentenced her to 25 years of hard labor at the Women’s Strict Regime Prison in Mordovia, Russia. According to Rondiak, Paraskevia found solace in handicraft:

While in prison, at great personal risk, Paraskevia began embroidering religious icons at night, by the light of the northern latitudes. She used cloth and threads from her clothes and fish bones for needles.  In 1953, Stalin died, and in 1956, Nikita Khrushchev granted amnesty to political prisoners who were victims of Stalin’s repressions.  Paraskevia received her “Certificate of Rehabilitation '' on July 2nd, 1956 and smuggled the embroidered icons (which were strictly forbidden by Soviet authorities) out of the prison by sewing them into her clothes.  Unable to join her family in America due to the Iron Curtain, she returned to Kolomiya, Ukraine after which a written (albeit censored) trans-Atlantic correspondence began with Ola’s grandfather and mother. In the late sixties, an American tourist successfully smuggled the embroideries to her family in the West.  Paraskevia passed away in 1975.  She was well-known for her sewing, drawing, embroidering, and traditional cooking skills.  This is only one story of millions of displaced, imprisoned, and repressed Ukrainians in WWII. — Ola Rondiak

With no viable recourse for escape, Paraskevia improvised a lifestyle of handicraft and protest that would sustain and empower her. When women are denied a pen and voice, it’s needles that have proven their faithful servitude as a vehicle for women’s personal and political expression. Quilt-making in the US, for example, has occupied many significant roles in the American personal and national cultural tradition: as a home-good; a religious or personal memento; merchandise to fund the Revolutionary War; protest banners for the Suffragette movement; the American flag. Similarly, women in Japan were empowered through handicraft to support and protect their country. Through the mid-1900s, for example, Japanese men on the frontlines were protected by “Senbon-bari,” a white textile adorned with a thousand red knots, each hand-stitched and embedded with the prayers of a thousand anonymous women. 

Although often confined to the home, handicrafts, like the women who have made them, nurture their families and by extension, their countries. In Ola Rondiak’s case, the brush is her needle, and paint is her work – a silent protest of war and a tool for personal and cultural sustenance for future generations. One after the other, Rondiak paints Ukrainian female figures – a dynamic, repetitive motion that re-affirms the preservation of her cultural heritage. One day, she dreams of building a cultural center and exhibit in Kyiv to uphold the collective Ukrainian memory through art. Until then, her practice will continue its ritualistic protest for peace from abroad.