Marquette’s Raynor Library will present two exhibitions beginning at the end of January, including “Embroidered with Pain,” a traveling exhibition which tells the stories of wartime sexual violence survivors, which opens Saturday, Jan. 24, and runs through Tuesday, Feb. 24.
“Marquette’s Slavic Institute, a Home for Exiled Scholars,” which opens Monday, Jan. 26, celebrates the community of exiled scholars forced from the USSR during the Cold War.
“Embroidered with Pain” shares the uncomfortable and often hidden stories of Ukrainians who have survived wartime sexual violence through a thousand-year-old Ukrainian tradition of embroidering life events on decorative and ritual cloth known as rushnyk. The exhibit presents six reproductions of unique Ukrainian rushnyk tapestries, each encoded with traditional embroidered symbols that reveal the story of a wartime sexual violence survivor.
The official exhibit will be presented in the Raynor Library lobby. The exhibit was developed by Ukraine’s One Health on behalf of the Mental Health for Ukraine project and with the support of the Ministry of Health of Ukraine. The Raynor Library installment is sponsored by the Wisconsin Ukrainians organization.
The “Slavic Institute” at Marquette emerged as an academic home for a number of exiled scholars in the 1950s. This exhibit was cultivated with materials curated from university archives and includes history, stories, photos and a modest collection of books that were curated by these scholars.
