Visually Harnessing Trauma
Sandra Mayo’s art uses beauty to gently reveal deep trauma, turning memory into a powerful, shared experience.
It seems impossible to imagine escaping the Holocaust to then lose your loved one in the Argentinian Dirty War—yet this is what happened to not just one but two women who are the subjects of artist Sandra Mayo’s show, “Printed and Stitched in Time: Stories of Undaunted Women.”
This show represents the array of emotions and techniques embedded in Mayo’s work that she brings to the 2024-2025 CJP x JArts/Vilna Shul Community Creative Fellowship.
Mayo’s use of genograms, pictures representing family relations, most often used by sociologists, is not fully what you expect to encounter in an art gallery, and they are incredibly effective.
Mayo’s show was up at The Vilna Shul, Boston’s Center for Jewish Culture, in late March, and reactions to the show were so powerful that I wanted to take a moment to share a few reflections from Mayo on this experience.
“’The show is really beautiful, so I went up to read more—and then, wow, I realized how heavy it is.’ That was a comment from a Panamanian visitor that stayed with me. It means the visual language did its work—the softness of the materials, the textures and stitching made space for people to approach difficult content gently. If someone is first drawn in by beauty and then stays to sit with the weight of the story, I feel the art has done what it needed to do. That tension—between beauty and pain—is where real engagement begins.
“As an artist and educator, this scenario was a dream come true! I couldn’t ask for more given that I had never met Jewish Panamanians before. I was struck by how thoughtful and tuned in they were. They were deeply familiar with Jewish history and have been very active in their community back home. At one point, a visitor read Sara Rus’s quote out loud—’I’ve lost so much but I have so much’—then paused, looked up, and said, ‘I get it.’
Read more and watch full interview at https://www.jewishboston.com/read/visually-harnessing-trauma/