#me.Rom: After 9/11, Katalin Gyokeny used her gallery to help people cope with their trauma

“We spoke no English, we had no money, we knew nobody. Well, my first husband walked on foot to a Food Basket to buy something…and ran into people in that parking lot who were from Lučenec…that was fantastic, because they then took us to Balboa Park, and there we met met some other Hungarians and then it was better,” she describes the start of her life in the USA.

After studying at the School of Visual Arts in New York, Gyokeny earned an MFA in 1996. She taught at Nassau Community College and Queensborough Community College.

Gyokeny works in ceramics, drawing, painting and sculpture. Speaking to us in her New York apartment, she explains the subjects of the oil paintings on the walls: “My grandma, my husband, my mother, my daughter, these are people I keep painting.”

In the interview she also describes her work as an artist and educator after the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center in New York. She opened an art workshop for those who needed a way to cope with their experiences of that traumatic event: “At the time I wasn’t even an art therapist, I just wanted to contribute somehow. I had my art gallery in SOHO, so we did the workshops there for everybody, anybody who wanted could come, children, adults, anybody.”

Thanks to collaboration with friends in Slovakia, she also received paintings produced by children from Jarovnice, a Romani settlement. “I was in shock when I saw these beautiful pictures. If you saw how they live! […] When I saw that poverty, I wanted to cry,” she tells us.

She and her current husband, Ivan, now plan to return to Slovakia. She has concerns about returning: “I’m awfully afraid of that. Ivan is looking forward to it because he is returning to his family, to his friends and so forth, but I basically don’t have anybody there anymore, just a cousin and the people who basically discriminated against me when I used to live there, it was because of them that I left in the first place, so I’m afraid to go back. I’ve grown to love it here. I’m at home here.”

Speaking of her identity as a Romani woman, Gyokeny says: “Naturally, the best thing would be if we never had to discuss it at all, that it would be normal. I’m me, you’re you. Should it matter whether I’m Romani? It matters, though, unfortunately it still matters.”

František Bikár is filming the documentary series #me.Rom for ROMEA TV, offering a unique view of the lives of Romani people living in three different states in the USA. ROMEA TV will be broadcasting a total of five interviews in the online series.