Czech Center

"Czech with a Z!" I told everyone asking about my plans this weekend.

This one is like a week late and I am sending it out unfinished cause I’m just trying to get it out the door so I can write the next! Enjoy! Hope you guys are all doing well!

Czech it out!

New York City, among many many other things, is a hub for foreign dignitaries and embassies to the United States. It’s home to the United Nations Headquarters and the Upper East Side is dotted with consulates and formal cultural spaces of dozens of country.

I think it’s cool when those places decide to display art that highlights their national pride.

The Czech Center was established in the 1890s, with a building designed by William C. Frohne. Their website describes it as “a rare survivor of the many social halls built in the nineteenth century for New York’s immigrant ethnic communities”. It was renovated in the 1990s and declared an historic landmark in 1994. It has since its inception sought to promote Czechia by showcasing Czech culture, art and innovations in a prominent space in New York City.

The Czech Center from the outside— its flags still hanging proudly on such a gray and dismal day.

The Czech Center doesn’t have a great amount of square footage dedicated to museum space, but it has an excellent little spiral staircase to climb to the second floor, where they have on display a rotating collection of art from Czechian and Czechian-American artists.

On display now is the exhibition Czech Luminaries: Silhouettes by Hana Shannon, a New York City resident. Shannon began portraiture in 2016 and turned her attention to silhouettes and to figures from her Czechian home in the pandemic lockdowns of 2020. She reports finding it therapeutic both to immerse herself in the figures of a home country that she could not at the time return to and to reflect on how shadowed people close to her felt in the loneliness of isolation.

Each portrait depicts a Czechian figure recognized for their achievements in the arts and sciences— Shannon chose to stay away from political and military figures— and each portrait is in profile, except for that of Franz Kafka, who stares directly at the viewer from an otherwise completely dark face.

Though modest in both size and scope, the Czech Center’s decision to include artwork from New York-based Czechian artists