The Arts of Alice Lok Cahana, Ronnie Cahana and Kitra Cahana
January 26 – May 25, 2025
The exhibition explores the work of three artists representing three generations of one family–Holocaust survivor Allice Lok Cahana (1929 – 2017), her oldest son, Ronnie Cahana (born 1953), a survivor of a major stroke, and his daughter, Kitra Cahana (born 1987), a filmmaker and photographer.
Alice Lok Cahana grew up in Sarvar, Hungary. She survived four different camps in the last year of the war, losing every member of her extended family, except for her father and including her beloved older sister, Edith—who survived, only to perish from illness immediately after liberation.
Alice swore an oath to herself while in the camps that, if she survived, she would become an artist; her oldest son Ronnie, intensely responsive to his mother’s history, became a poet and his oldest daughter, Kitra, became a filmmaker and photographer.
One of Kitra’s more extraordinary bodies of work focuses on her father after a brain-stem stroke forced him into an initial bed-ridden condition, not able to breathe on his own, but still writing poetry in his mind. The family rallied around him and began to write out his poems by following his eye-blinks, one letter at a time.
This powerful story of personal survival against crushing odds is explored through the paintings of Alice, the poems of Ronnie and the photographs and films of Kitra.
Image Above: Alice Lok Cahana, Triptych: right panel, 1984, Collection Ronnie and Michael Cahana, Inv. 052
The exhibition is curated by Ori Z. Soltes and Rachel Stern and presented by the Fritz Ascher Society for Persecuted, Ostracized and Banned Art. Funding has been generously provided by the Craig E. Wollner Exhibition Fund of OJMCHE, the Arnold and Augusta Newman Photography Fund of OJMCHE, and the Judy Marges Education and Culture Fund.
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