Raya's Life
May 21,1947-September 17, 2021
Raya Bodnarchuk has been an essential part of the arts ecosystem in Washington since Glen Echo Park was reborn by the National Park Service as a Center for the Arts in 1974. She became one of its first Artists in Residence and gave fourteen years working and teaching in that community. Her imagery was, and still is, closely identified with Glen Echo Park, appearing on publications, posters, and banners for many years. Then, for thirty-two years, she was a faculty member during the golden age of the Corcoran College of Art & Design. Together with her extensive exhibition career and public commissions, Raya has been at the center of what was good in Washington over the past half century.
"Do something you love everyday."
Through it all, Raya never wavered from her commitment to her art and to the craft of art, or from passing along her knowledge of making and her modeling of what it means to be a true artist to the next generation…Her art celebrates the light, the positive side of our lives, even during our darkest hours.
Raya is best known for her sculpture, collages, and silkscreen prints, [as well as her small paintings from her exhibition, This Is a True Picture of How it Was.]
What began as good advice for her students (“Do something you love every day”) evolved into a brilliant chronicle of six years of her life beginning in 2013:
“Every day I would find something I could use as a subject, come home and remember it, or bring something home, put it on my table and paint it. Then I’d paint all the things on my table, everything in my house, and then my neighborhood when I’d go for a walk in the dark before going to bed. The thing was to do one every day. That wasn’t the only thing I did, but it was something I did without fail.”
1,926 paintings later, the advice for her students, which she took herself, seems like good advice for all of us.
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Text pulled from the exhibition catalog of This Is a True Picture of How it Was, written by Jack Rasmussen, Director and Curator at American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center. The full exhibition catalog can be found here.
"The thing was to do one every day. That wasn’t the only thing I did, but it was something I did without fail."
