An Interview with Mira Hnatyshyn-Hudson
Aimee Resnick (she/her) - February 20, 2023
Mira Hnatyshyn-Hudson is an American-Ukrainian artist focusing on femininity, the burden of maintaining culture, and historical erasure. Working across painting, collage, assemblage, digital and installation art, Hnatyshyn-Hudson constructs immersive visual realities for her viewers to convey a newly empathetic experience. Today, Hnatyshyn-Hudson is an adjunct professor at The Southwest School of Art, teaching portrait painting and drawing. This week, we sat down to discuss the limits of naturalism, the divine feminine, and the modern Ukrainian conflict.
NAR: Let’s begin with your family history. Can you walk us through how your family arrived in the United States? What prompted your family to immigrate?
Hnatyshyn-Hudson: My father immigrated to the United States shortly after World War II: he attended the University of Alabama on scholarship to receive a Bachelors of Science in Electrical Engineering. Several years later, in 1958, my mother visited her extended family in New York City and met my father. They married and had six kids eventually.
The story behind my father’s immigration starts during the war. He was taken from his village in Ukraine by the occupying German Army and forced into slave labor. When the Allied forces freed everybody, he was faced with either staying in Germany, returning to Ukraine, or immigrating to America. And he chose the latter so that he could have a future without any kind of discrimination: there was a lot going on in Europe after the war. The war did not end, even if it had ended officially.
My mother immigrated after she met my father, of course, but it was years later that she actually received her citizenship. I remember vividly how proud everybody was of her. So that's how we came to be. They moved around with some of my older siblings for a while before I came along, but they settled in Maryland and that's where I was born and raised.
NAR: You call your work an “amplified version of realism.” Can you expand on this idea? Where does your creation surpass naturalism?
Hnatyshyn-Hudson: I use “an amplified version of realism” to expand on the narrative of painting through integrating collage and sculpture. This is with the intention of creating a space that the viewer can walk into and maintain their presence, they can be a part of that space, they can be a part of the dialogue. These objects lend symbolic and psychological significance to increase the viewer's perception of the real versus the idealized.
So that's where naturalism comes in: I create an image that looks natural, but then I take it out of that. My aesthetic is based on contrasts that go beyond optical illusion.
My process starts with the narratives rooted in my photo, which I call Peoplescapes. These are photos I take of people in different countries I travel to. So, again, it's rooted in the narratives of my Peoplescapes but the art-making process of painting and the installation eventually becomes the piece itself.
When you brought up this question, it reminded me of a book that I loved maybe 10 or 15 years ago. It’s called Thinking Long: Contemporary Art In The North Of Ireland by Liam Kelly. It was put together in 1996. Basically, the idea behind this book is that we have no single right answers, but simply multiple differing perspectives. The book is based on artists reflecting on the Northern Ireland wars: I think it really reflected on what I know about Ukraine, what my parents went through, and what so many other people have gone through in history.
So in my work, I started thinking along the same terms. It breaks down into three things: what might happen in the future, our choices for affecting the future, and what we do and do not know about the consequences of those choices.
When people walk into an exhibition with a diorama, their perspectives change. They first see painted images of people, but then they notice the sculpted objects and how they form a collage several feet in front of them. They ask questions
It isn't just about creating an illusion. There’s also a certain level of interpretation. The viewer brings their own baggage into the work.
NAR: In your "Portrait Series," you hyper-extend traditional oil portraits into the viewer's space through collages of personal, delicate objects. What inspired these dioramas? How does sculpture portray subjects differently than painting?
Hnatyshyn-Hudson: The first diorama was lineage portraits made from images I found of the paintings done by anonymous court painters for the Tudor royal family. These were the first works in which I used sculpted fabric. I brought fabric into the series because of the incredible fabric paintings in these [Tudor] portraits.
However, I made a conscious decision to collage the Tudor family in brown cotton fabric because cotton was associated with slavery. I can attribute my interest in fabric to the Gee’s Bend quilt storytellers from Alabama. That’s where it ties together with storytelling. I was really intrigued by their storytelling within those quilts.
I started by using fabrics of the people I was familiar with. And who was I more familiar with than my family? It was the women artists around me. I was interested in these women artists because of the stories that I was hearing from them: there were very personal things going on in their lives. So each inspired me to create an initial photograph of them.
There’s this one picture, it’s a big portrait of my friend. At the time we were eating lunch. It was her birthday lunch and her ex-husband was there. And she was just sort of hugging herself. I took a photograph of that because I found it profound, the way she was hugging herself.
When I did the painting, I added birthday Crayola crayons next to her. They were symbolic of her youth, and how it impacted her psychologically. But something was going on beyond that: I found out later that she had been a victim of domestic violence. And that was after I did the painting itself.
So, there's a level of the unseen, or the intuitive, that comes into some of these works. Women go through certain things they don't talk about. That is itself the emotional fabric that women share. The fabric is symbolic throughout the work. The fabric holds us all together, it's something that everybody needs to shelter their body. My mother was a seamstress, and I watched her sew our clothes when we were growing up. It meant a lot to me.
NAR: What inspired Euroscapes? What is the importance of women in maintaining culture?
Hnatyshyn-Hudson: It was an exhibit of two large-scale painting installations, The Braid Basket, and Every Girl Wants To Be Queen. Both were created from photos that I took of women and young girls in two separate trips in Europe: one was in Britain and one was in Ukraine. The weight of history and culture seemed to plague the development of identity.
You know, I was there walking around London Tower, and that building has an incredibly gruesome history. The walkway where these young girls were climbing was a place where people had been beheaded. horror kind of history. They were going up the staircase and I saw the moment and I took the photograph and one of the young girls looked right at me. It was sort of this incredible moment where I said to myself “this is their history. I'm here from the United States and this is their history. They're walking around learning about it.”
At some point we all walk through places like this and wonder how much others want to burden themselves with the responsibility of understanding what happened there. It also goes back to the Lineage series about the Tudor family. And I got to thinking: does every girl really want to grow up to be queen?
Then, in Braid Basket, My husband and I were walking through a plaza and everything seemed fairly normal – but there was underlying tension. The tension you feel when people aren't completely sovereign in what they can say or do. There was a young woman selling flowers.
When I got back to the United States, the Revolution of Dignity happened. I knew that there was this underlying tension regarding democracy. Euroscapes is about that.When your heritage is under threat, it's very important to undertake the preservation of culture. It's very intuitive, too. It just happens. You want to talk about your family, your family's history, and all the art or music or writing or language.
NAR: Your exhibition "Feminine Divine" explores the stories of women often left untold. What stories of the feminine do you most want our readers to know? How can reimagining history through a feminist lens uplift present activism?
Hnatyshyn-Hudson: Women were leaders centuries ago and they lead countries today. But patriarchal cultures are persistent in diminishing their roles. Men and male religious organizations have written history (His Story) and mythology with women as the villian. It's not just that women have less power and little agency. They are framed as an active threat to social order if they are independent or step beyond the cultural standards.
Through the feminist lens we can gain an understanding of how gender defines women’s agency – this is, women’s “ability to define and act on goals, make decisions that matter to them, and participate in the economy and public life." You know, the basics.
Today, we find ourselves in a war on women and people who do not identify with their assigned sex or gender at birth. The greatest activism is knowledge. Learn, write, create art, teach, listen, work together. My greatest hope is that my work contributes to our collective understanding. Women must be free to lead to their full potential, and be fully celebrated for their contributions.
NAR: Has the war in Ukraine altered your current artistic practice?
Hnatyshyn-Hudson: My artistic practice became a refuge from the despair I felt when war broke out. A fiber artist friend of mine threw me a lifeline when she offered to teach me how to weave. She lent me her portable loom and over a period of three months I created multiple weaves, each responding to a different atrocity. Every day you'd read about something new.
So I would focus on my weaves and my emotions. I actually think I saw colors at the time. Different types of colors, intuitively. Weaving just wonderfully pulled me out of my comfort zone of painting and sculpture. Weaving was something so new.
The same friend who gave me the loom said I should take a class on tapestry. And that was just the tip of the iceberg. I did a lot of research. I created my own tapestry loom. And I started making these three tapestries reflecting three letters that the Soviet Union tried to erase from the Ukrainian language. These letters didn't fit in with the Russian alphabet, but the Ukrainians refused and kept the letters. I feel these little tapestries are vital with Russia’s war on Ukraine.
They're trying to eradicate the Ukrainian identity by bombing civilian homes and residencies and villages and cultural institutions and museums and hospitals. Everything is robbed.
NAR: In Every Girl Wants To Be Queen, you ask if every schoolgirl wants to be queen and what sort of queen she would be. Do you want to be queen, and what sort of queen would you be?
Hnatyshyn-Hudson: I don't really have an answer to that other than that most people inherit queendom from their family. I would say that I’ve suffered insecurities and fears my whole life. I often think about that line from Stephen King's novel, Dolores Claiborne: “Sometimes, being a bitch is all a woman has to hold onto.” I love that. In my own mind, I replace bitch with Queen and suddenly the statement has agency. I love it.
Please note: this interview has been edited for length and clarity.
