CCHAP Bus Tour: Eastern European Sacramental Art, 2004
SubjectPortrait of
Marek Czarnecki
(Polish-American)
Date2004 September 11
MediumPositive color film slides
ClassificationsGraphics
Credit LineConnecticut Cultural Heritage Arts Program collections
CopyrightIn Copyright
Object number2015.196.1119.1-.16
DescriptionSlide photographs of the CCHAP Bus Tour on Eastern European Sacramental Art to sites and art studios in Bristol, Meriden, and Terryville on September 11, 2004.
(1) Dożynki harvest festival at St. Stanislaus Church in Bristol. The harvest ornament was made by Marek Czarnecki.
(.2-.5) The interior of St. Michael’s Ukrainian Catholic Church in Terryville.
(.6-.11) Marek Czarnecki presenting his work to bus tour participants in his Meriden studio.
(.12-.14) The bus tour visit to St. Michael’s Ukrainian Catholic Church in Terryville, where Marek Czarnecki and Father Paul Luniw discussed his pysanky.
(.15-.16) The bus tour visit to Marek Czarnecki’s Meriden studio. Iconography and statue restoration are visible.
NotesSubject Note: The Connecticut Cultural Heritage Arts Program at the Institute for Community Research collaborated with Manchester Community College (MCC) on a cultural tourism project in 2004-2008. Each year, three or four day-long bus tours visited cultural events and artist studios in ethnic communities living in different parts of the state as a way for new audiences to experience and meet Connecticut’s ethnic and occupational communities. Project goals included 1) expanding awareness of unfamiliar art forms and heritage tourism assets, 2) encouraging access to little-known ethnic or occupational communities, 3) creating audience and artist interactions, 4) stimulating sales and commissions of traditional arts and foods, and 5) developing new partnerships with community organizations and artists. The tours were developed and led by the Connecticut state folk arts program director, Lynne Williamson along with artists from each community. The partnership with MCC ensured that the tours were advertised in the Credit-Free Catalogue each semester. Audiences for the tours were primarily members of the Older Adults Association, a core audience for MCC’s Credit-Free courses. (1) Dożynki harvest festival at St. Stanislaus Church in Bristol. The harvest ornament was made by Marek Czarnecki.
(.2-.5) The interior of St. Michael’s Ukrainian Catholic Church in Terryville.
(.6-.11) Marek Czarnecki presenting his work to bus tour participants in his Meriden studio.
(.12-.14) The bus tour visit to St. Michael’s Ukrainian Catholic Church in Terryville, where Marek Czarnecki and Father Paul Luniw discussed his pysanky.
(.15-.16) The bus tour visit to Marek Czarnecki’s Meriden studio. Iconography and statue restoration are visible.
Each day-long bus tour included a visit to folk artists’ studios or shops to observe them producing or selling their work, while engaging with visitors in discussions on the history of their communities and the background of their art form. Tours stopped at related landmarks and/or restaurants in the artists’ neighborhoods, or attended a local community festival. The artists and community groups visited gave insightful presentations on their cultures and artistic traditions. Each tour included a traditional dinner or lunch where visitors could sit down to eat and talk with the artists and community members. CCHAP received an NEA Challenge America Cultural Tourism grant for a pilot series of bus tours in 2004. Subsequent project funders also included the Greater Hartford Arts Council, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Connecticut Commission on Culture and Tourism.
Eastern European Traditional and Sacramental Art: The September 11, 2004 tour visited the studio of iconographer and community scholar Marek Czarnecki where he demonstrated icon painting and discussed the history and use of this art form. With Czarnecki as guide, the tour stopped in Terryville, Connecticut to view the icon screen at St. Michael’s Ukrainian Catholic Church, and to learn about the Ukrainian pysanky created by Father Paul Luniw. The tour then traveled to St. Stanislaus Church in Bristol to view icons created by Czarnecki and the harvest ornament displayed at the altar. Participants then attended the Dozynki Harvest Festival held on the grounds of St. Stanislaus, experiencing Polish music and a variety of Polish foods, and meeting Polish residents.
Subject Note: Harvest festivals, Dożynki, were once common in the agricultural regions of Poland. The harvesting of grain for bread was crucial to survival, and many customs in rural Poland were designed to encourage a good crop. As with so many Polish celebrations, spiritual and secular worlds and concerns intertwine at this important time of year. Harvest time in late summer coincided with the religious Feast of the Assumption on August 15, celebrating the ascension of Mary into Heaven. On this feast day called Matka Boska Zielna, or Our Lady of the Herbs, women brought bouquets of herbs and flowers to the church to be blessed so that the healing powers of the plants would strengthen. At home they would place sprigs of herbs behind holy pictures on the wall. Flowers, herbs, and sheaves of wheat and rye were made into ornaments for dożynki celebrations. Some of these were large and heavy, symbolizing an abundant harvest, and some were shaped to suggest figures or topped with religious statues. Those involved in the harvest also fashioned dożynki wreaths in the shape of a crown out of grains, flowers, nuts, fruit, and ribbons. A young girl who had worked on the harvest would wear the wreath in procession to the house of the farmer, to whom the wreath would be presented.
In Connecticut several Polish American communities still hold dożynki festivals even though most people live and work in urban or suburban settings rather than on farms. The purpose of dożynki in Polonia is to reinstill an understanding of “Polishness” through using ceremony, music, and objects and values reminiscent of customs from Poland. For nineteen years New Britain has produced a festival featuring an open-air mass with a blessing and distribution of bread, folk dancing, craft and food vendors. Other communities holding annual harvest masses and festivals include Bristol’s St. Stanislaus Kostka Church and parish, and in Bridgeport/Ansonia at the White Eagle Social Club. Elaborate dożynki ornaments are still made and carried into the church during the festivals. While contemporary dożynki celebrations tend to be socials and parish fundraisers rather than agricultural rituals, they retain a strong sense of the way spirituality affects the daily lives of Polish Americans.
Biographical Note: Marek Czarnecki began writing icons in 1990 for his home parish of St. Stanislaus Kostka in Bristol, Connecticut. It was appropriate for this first generation Polish-American that his first icon would be of Our Lady of Czestochowa, the Black Madonna of Poland. Leaving behind a contemporary art education, the icon became his sole interest as an artist. Iconography is a fundamental liturgical art form that provides authentic, meaningful and dignified images which exemplify the larger consciousness of the Christian Church. Icons carry a patrimony of both theology and art, conveying essential dogmatic and biographical information and embodying the presence of the holy ones depicted.
After studying with several iconography teachers, Marek began a life-long apprenticeship with master iconographer Ksenia Pokrovskaya in 1999. He has translated her teachings into an English language technical manual for iconographers, and taught workshops with her at several national sites, including St. Tikhon's Seminary in South Canaan, Pennsylvania. Following established tradition, Marek’s icons are made with natural materials; the foundation is linen glued to a wood panel and primed with a marble-based gesso. Painted with egg tempera mixed with natural earth and mineral pigments, the halos and backgrounds are gilded with 22 karat gold. The icon is then varnished with copal resin.
Marek’s icons can be found in in the homes and chapels of individuals, as well as churches across the country, including the Catholic Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in Springfield, Illinois, the Franciscan University of Steubenville, St. Thomas More Chapel at Yale University, and Sean Cardinal O'Malley. His icon of "Christ the Eternal High Priest", originally written for a seminary chapel, gained him international attention when it was chosen by the United States Council of Catholic Bishops as the image to represent "The Year of the Priest". This icon was widely distributed; more than a million copies were printed, reproduced, and used in dioceses as distant as London, Stockholm, Singapore, and Sydney. Marek is also a skilled restoration artist, working with statues from churches across the country, and he creates ornaments and installations to mark festivals and holy seasons in his parish church of St. Stanislaus in Bristol Connecticut.
Marek helped edit the book, "Hidden and Triumphant: The Struggle to Save Russian Iconography in Twentieth Century Russia" (Paraclete Press, 2010). He continues to teach and write icons out of his studio in Meriden, Connecticut. He has won a Connecticut Commission on the Arts Painting Fellowship in 1996 and 2004, the 1998 American Council for Polish Culture Award, the 2006 Polish American Historical Association Outstanding Achievement Award, and a Southern New England Traditional Arts Apprenticeship Grant to teach an advanced student. Articles on his work have appeared in the Hartford Courant, St. Anthony Messenger, Catholic Digest, Our Sunday Visitor, and New York Times.
Subject Note: The Ukrainian art form of pysanky takes its name from the verb pysaty, to write, reflecting the way that lines of decoration are inscribed in beeswax on a white unblemished egg, dipped into dyes several times (once for every color), and then revealed by melting the wax. Pysanky is a beloved Easter tradition in Eastern European Catholic and Orthodox communities.
Biographical Note: Master pysanky artist Paul Luniw was born in Halifax, England in 1951 to a Ukrainian immigrant family. He learned to “write” Ukrainian pysanky, decorative and symbolic Easter eggs, from his mother as well as friends and relatives from the Ukrainian community and in Ukrainian school. Father Paul moved to Connecticut in 1994 and currently serves as parish priest at St. Michael’s Ukrainian Church in Terryville.
Pysanky require patience, concentration, and precision; for Father Paul, the process of designing and writing eggs becomes like a prayer, a meditation, and a service to the world. His pysanky designs are based on the traditional ones that go back hundreds if not thousands of years and represent the natural elements of the universe, such as the moon and sun, stars, flowers, and animals. With the advent of Christianity in Ukraine in 988, symbols such as fish, churches, and crosses blended in with the pagan designs. Ukrainian embroidery has many similar designs. Colors play a symbolic role as well, with red signaling happiness and love, yellow as prosperity and fertility, green promoting abundance, and blue for health. Father Paul works with several types of egg, including ostrich, rhea, duck, goose, quail, chicken, and finch.
People from Eastern European communities as well as others commission eggs, and Father Paul also gives pysanky as gifts, including a series of 12 eggs symbolizing the 12 apostles presented to Pope John Paul II in Rome while studying there. He has given demonstrations in England, in Rome to seminaries and ecclesiastical institutions, and in the U.S. to church groups such as Our Lady of Czechostowa in Turners Falls, Massachusetts and at events such as the Old Deerfield Museum Eastern European Festival. Father Paul demonstrated at the Lowell Folklife Festival in 2006. During a two-year apprenticeship in 2004-2006, Father Paul Luniw taught Carol Kostecki advanced techniques of Ukrainian egg decoration including more difficult ways of dividing the egg for designs, figurative designs (especially icons), etching designs, new color schemes, and varnishing techniques.
Father Paul’s eggs have been collected and exhibited in the Ukrainian Museums in London and Manchester, England; in Rome at the Holy See, St. Sofia’s, St. Sergus and Bachus, and at St. Josaphat’s Seminary; and in the U.S. in Philadelphia at jewelry shops and churches. He has been featured on the BBC program Blue Peter, and WTNH/Channel 8 News in Hartford twice. An hour-long program was broadcast about his pysanky by Nutmeg Television in 2005. In 2008, Father Paul won a prestigious Fund For Folk Culture Individual Artist Fellowship. Father Paul was awarded a Connecticut Office of the Arts Folk Arts Fellowship in 2015.
Additional materials exist in the CCHAP archive for this event and these artists.
Cataloging Note: This project was made possible in part by the Institute of Museum and Library Services MA-245929-OMS-20.
Status
Not on view
2008 September 6
2000-2001 December-March
Daniel Boucher
2008 March 8
2008 April 19
