Art show features artist and Holocaust survivor Lucy Kreisler Smith

At a gallery in the St. Paul Vandalia Tower, Dan Smith runs around adjusting spotlights and straightening paintings. He’s putting on an impromptu art retrospective featuring hundreds of artworks by his mother, Lucy Kreisler Smith, who died in 2022 at the age of 89.

“A lot of her painting was influenced by the Holocaust, but there’s only a couple of them that I could say are directly about the Holocaust,” Dan Smith says. “There’s a lot of political things in her drawings, some of which are quite relevant today.”

The show is called “Dark to Light: From the Holocaust to America.”

person points at painting — The paintings “Holocaust Shabbat,” (1980) and an untitled and undated painting featuring Catholic imagery by artist Lucy Kreisler Smith. To survive, the artist’s son Dan Smith says, his mother spent years pretending to be Catholic.

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Kreisler Smith was born to a Jewish family in 1933 in Kraków, Poland. Her family was placed in the Kraków Ghetto in 1939. They were able to evade Nazi death camps because they secured fake baptism papers to pretend to be Catholic.

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“When she was six years old, she went to school, and a month later, they kicked her out because the Holocaust started,” Dan Smith says. “She’s a survivor, and she grew up and studied painting and was a prolific painter and a good one — and a weaver, and well, whatever she could get her hands on.”

6 studies — Studies by the late artist Lucy Kreisler Smith, a Holocaust survivor who died in 2022 at the age of 89.

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The artworks on view span the artist’s life, from Kraków and Paris to Vermont and finally St. Paul. There are Paris and Warsaw cityscapes, fantastical dreamscapes reminiscent of artist Marc Chagall and gestural portraits. Kreisler Smith studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, Dan Smith says.

Smith hung one large canvas from the ceiling in a dark room with a single spotlight. It shows a girl without a face sitting in a chair against a forest backdrop.

“This is how my mom viewed herself as a child — the faceless girl,” Smith says. “She always felt not listened to.”

painting of a woman — “This is how my mom viewed herself as a child — the faceless girl,” says Dan Smith of his mother Lucy Kreisler Smith’s painting.

Alex V. Cipolle | MPR News

Another is called “Holocaust Shabbat,” painted in 1980.

“Kind of a brutal painting,” Smith says. “A monstrous figure bent over a plate with a fish on it.”

Many of the artworks — which also include textiles and painted glass — are untitled and undated.

“The thing about my mom is, she didn’t want to sell her paintings and she never really promoted herself. She painted for herself,” Smith says.

Kreisler Smith’s collection includes more than 300 artworks. Dan Smith, an only child, says one of the reasons for the exhibition is to bring awareness to his mother’s work; he’s looking for someone to take care of it.