The 1990’s Czechoslovak art scene began for me in my hometown of Los Angeles, as Tomáš Ruller prepared his performance at the Barnsdall Municipal Art Gallery in a darkened theatre in the afternoon that Václav Havel gave his presidential acceptance speech and we all stopped in mid-motion to hear his voice on the radio. The magic and sheer absurdity of us all being in that theatre in L.A., Zdenka Gabalová (my co-curator), Tomáš, and several of the L.A. artists who had been in Prague with us the summer before, was not lost on us. Before November 17th, my insistence that this would be an international exchange, not just an exhibition in Prague, seemed impossible given the Cold War history of our two nations. Just a year before I had been in another darkened theatre in Prague, meeting Havel and (with a translator), receiving his enthusiastic blessing for our project to bring American artists to Czechoslovakia. It was only with that blessing that such a feat was made possible. Our grassroots fundraising to bring the US artists to Prague, ship the artworks, etc., had left my bank account and my optimism depleted. Many of us were still students at the time. There was no official institution organizing our Dialog event, it was myself and many helpers, who were constantly trying to find money to make it all happen. And that would become a harbinger of the 1990’s in general: amazing things materialized, but there was always a search for funding that would often leave the curators, artists, and organizers depleted. Despite the initial euphoria of November’s political change, the reality of a culture without institutional support for its creatives would eventually bring hard realities to the artists by the end of the decade.

Since that time over thirty years ago, I’ve settled in the Bohemian countryside, raised a family, started an NGO that has brought hundreds and hundreds of international artists, students and creatives to our country, and maintained the cross-cultural connection between California and all things Czech. As an émigré artist (albeit with Czech heritage, that inspired me to learn the language), the 1990’s were a time of great fruition in the country, spurred on by the only-recently introduced market economy.1

Traveling throughout Czechoslovakia during the 1980’s one was struck by the innovative impulse of artists that managed to survive despite oppressive situations in the society and therefore culture. We cannot understand the flourishing of the 1990’s decade without the roots in the earlier decade, when “DIY exhibitions” meant possible police suppression, interrogation, and consequences in the family and friend group that could be unbearable. The risk the artists took before 1989, were not only audacious, but set the foundation for the explosion of social creativity after 1989.

In the summer of 1990, we were finally able to bring the Czech and Slovak artists to California and exhibit their work. It was a jubilant celebration. The world seemed to have embraced the small country in Central Europe that had helped to bring down totalitarianism. There was a flood of institutional support from the US government, movie stars, and the City of Los Angeles. We had five exhibition spaces, a symposium, two catalogues were published; they were the darling of the U.S. Press. Gabalová, who was by then a curator at P.S. 1 Museum in New York, brought three of the artists for another show (Ivan Kafka, Tomáš Ruller, Vladimir Kokolia) to excellent reviews. The decade started off brilliantly for Russian and other former Soviet bloc country artists because they were new to the Western market.

By the time I moved to Prague in 1992 (on a Fulbright), I was no longer "the only American" in the country. Exhibitions were popping up everywhere, from abandoned synagogues (Palmovka in Libeň), churches (Emauzy in Slovany), to even the basement of the building of Prague Faculty Hospital on Karlovo náměstí, (where I discovered that the Dr. Faustus had possibly established his alchemical laboratory on the site). I proposed an exhibition there, invited two other artists (Veronika Bromová and Jana Tichá as curators), and we installed the work. Prague Castle opened up one of its small chapels and Margita Titlová and I installed another show there in 1995. The same year I proposed an installation at the US Ambassador’s Residence on what was then Zikmunda Wintra street in the former villa of Petschek family, after the empty underground swimming pool was discovered there. Surprisingly, the red tape was cut and the vernisáž was open to the public. These types of shows would never be possible today. But in the 90’s, there was unlimited freedom to propose ideas and make it happen if one could pull off a little funding from some obscure source.

In Prague at that time there was funding from the Ministry of Culture for catalogues and exhibitions. The energy was high, and the population was hopeful. The longstanding “cultural capital”, accumulated by Czechoslovak artists over the generations, was finally bringing in the dividends internationally. The world once again looked towards that small country in Central Europe that carried heart.

And that was because of small artistic communities like Hermit in the Plasy Monastery, that eschewed the Western commodification of art, and created a community of artists. Miloš’s experience as an émigré in Holland, gave him the collateral and connections to approach and invite artists from around the continent (and beyond) to this mesmerizing space at the former baroque cloister near Plzen. Hermit Foundation, our ArtMill space in rural Bohemia, the theatre at Slavonice, and many more small art collectives and “alternative" spaces both rural and in the cities, were part of a time when we all hoped the country would embrace something like Alexander Dubček’s vision of “Socialism with a human face”. It was a time of questions and possibilities, when the solid capitalist economy could have been rejected for a new sort of compromise, when “alternative” galleries and spaces were thriving and trying to figure out how to survive financially. The state could only do so much.

And yet, institutions like the National Gallery in Prague (the Collection of Modern and Contemporary at Veletržní Palace), did hire Vojtěchovský as curator under the leadership of Jaroslav Anděl during the period of 1996-8. The exhibition project, “Jitro Kouzelniků? / Dawn of the Magicians)₁. was inspired by the exhibition “Magiciens de la Terre” (1989) at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. Miloš‘s strengths in an esoteric, spiritual, and cosmological vision of art through the ages was evident in the selection of artists. I was honored to be included in the group. This was an important connection of the rural-based melting pot of experimental sites like Hermit and other ‘outsider’ art and artists. The premise and challenge to the historical canons of ‘modern art’, up until 1989 only represented in the National Gallery by certain standard bearers of the political status quo, proved too much for the institution to bear. Before the four-part exhibition could be completed, Anděl was sacked as Director, and the title of the project became a self-fulfilling prophecy of the era: ending in a question mark. It was 1998 and the cracks in the optimism began to show.

I would like to believe, and will hang onto the hope, that there are artists around the world who understand experiments like Hermit, and despite how famous they may be, nor how many international collections they are in, will still continue to accept invitations to remote places on the earth, like an 11th century Cistercian monastery in Central Europe on the edge of decline. Such was the likes of the recently departed native American artist Jimmie Durham. I will tell this little story about the 90’s and Hermit, as it sums up many things.

However Milos got Jimmie to the Czech Republic already in 1995, for me will be forever a mystery, but somehow I was summoned to pick him up at the airport in Prague. At that time, Durham was already preparing exhibitions at major established spaces in Western Europe, including Documenta or the Munich Kunstverein. Still, he became attracted to what was happening in Czech Republic because of the “Velvet Revolution” and the spirit of that political and social change across the world at that time. As a Cherokee person and artist, Durham had participated in the early Native American movements in the 1970’s to challenge the U.S. government for the hundred years of the takeover of their indigenous lands. No doubt knowing the history of the Czech lands and the colonization of the people by the Austrian Habsburg empire, then Soviet, he felt an affinity in the struggle and ensuing celebration of ‘freedom’, since 1989. By the time he moved to Europe, he was an elder statesman in the “art world”, and his arrival to Prague airport was part of the amazing things that happened in the 1990’s.

Meeting Jimmie at the airport was a great meeting of so many worlds, as happened during that decade: I had a rose in my hand, as is/was traditional to meet someone at the landing point. I watched all the arrivals and did not see any “Indian” looking folks getting off the plane. So I waited. Finally, the entire reception area was cleared, except for one gentleman in a suit, with lovely blue eyes, who looked right at me (thru me?). We smiled at one another: he, recognizing my complete reverse racism in not finding an “Indian” at the airport, and me, very embarrassed at that. We drove to Plasy, after a pit stop and some beers. I couldn’t stay for his drum performance, unfortunately, as I had babies at home to take care of by then, but the car ride was transformational.

What places and non-hierarchical spaces like Hermit do, is create community. Our space in SW Bohemia, ArtMill, has strived to create the same. (and luckily my eldest daughter, Gabriela, has now taken the helm as Director for the next generation). These connections and cross-currents (to paraphrase the name of the University of Michigan Press that translated so many of the Central European dissident writers) that flow among artists on the periphery of either geographical centers or imagined ones, are vital for our creative connections to continue globally. The experiment and contribution of the Czechoslovak scene in the 1990’s is one of ‘alternative’ creativity that defied the market for several years, until commercial galleries finally were welcomed in the cities. Artists need to eat, and the bottom line is that many artists were happy to finally be able to support their families, renovate their flats, buy a car, etc. The artists who came to places like Hermit in the 1990’s were definitely not looking to be wealthy, but more importantly, to be able to keep creating. The personal exchanges, the sharing of a meal (often from the local gardens), the firesides at night when music is made and spontaneous stories are told, these are as much a part of these alternative gatherings as the art itself. And as we come to recognize the role of environmental art and social practice as genres now taught in academies and written about in books₂, it is the experiential exchanges between artists and creatives that we remember more than the “thingness” of the outcome. The product of the creative act gathers dust, but the stories live on.

In retrospect, it was an experiment that seemed to have failed. And yet the disillusionment that followed is perhaps a harbinger of new momentums from the younger generation that are celebrating community and collaboration in a way the old Socialist state would not recognize, because it illudes to the totalitarian and authoritarianism that their grandparents had to endure. And they realize that the solidarity of a communal spirit is something indigenous to ancient traditions of these lands, and that there may be new ways to interpret and live on their lands, their birthright, and maintain places to co-create into the future.

This story and my own is in a longer version to be published by ArtMap in 2025 (in Czech), and in English, (2024)