A great man is one who collects knowledge the way a bee collects honey and uses it to help people overcome the difficulties they endure - hunger, ignorance and disease!
- Nikola Tesla

Remember, remember always, that all of us, and you and I especially, are descended from immigrants and revolutionists.
- Franklin Roosevelt

While their territory has been devastated and their homes despoiled, the spirit of the Serbian people has not been broken.
- Woodrow Wilson

Art and Reality: Serbian Perspectives

Art and Reality: Serbian Perspectives
Friday, May 1, 2015, 6:00 pm
Marshall D. Shulman Seminar Room (1219 IAB, 420 W 118th St.)

Please join the East Central European Center and the Harriman Institute for a talk by Svetlana Rakić.

Rakić will present some of the most recent trends in Serbian two-dimensional art. Selected examples testify to the diversity, vibrancy, and beauty of art produced in this troubled country during the turbulent past two decades. Having witnessed their former country, Yugoslavia, torn apart by civil war, and their ‘new’ country, Serbia, crippled by NATO bombings, political intrigues, corruption, staggering unemployment, and bleak prospects for recovery, these artists have turned to the creative potential of the human imagination to escape, confront, and comment on a situation over which they have no control. Despite the specificity of the conditions under which Serbian artists live and work, their works of art – poignant, inspiring, humorous, or despairing – touch a responsive chord in the viewer that attests to their success at achieving an expression that is both universal and human.

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Svetlana Rakić was born in Sarajevo (now Bosnia-Herzegovina) in 1958. She left her home country, Yugoslavia, in 1992 to come to the U.S. She received her M.A. in art history from the University of Belgrade, Serbia, in 1989 and her Ph.D. in art history from Indiana University, Bloomington in 1999. She teaches art and art history as a full professor at Franklin College, Indiana. Rakić is the author of two books on icons from Bosnia-Herzegovina, a book on the twentieth-century American painter Alexander Markovich, and numerous articles published in academic journals in Yugoslavia, Serbia, and the United States. Before coming to the U.S., Rakić worked as a curator at the State Art Gallery of Bosnia-Herzegovina in Sarajevo and as a consultant at the Institute for Preservation of Cultural Heritage of Bosnia-Herzegovina in Sarajevo. In addition to her interest in pre-modern and modern Western art, Rakić is a painter and has exhibited her works in the U.S., Germany, and Serbia.

Sponsored by the Njegos Endowment for Serbian Language and Culture.

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Jelena Stupljanin

Jelena Stupljanin

While in high school, Jelena ended up in a drama studio where she was trained and tutored by the late legendary acting professor Milenko Maricic. Then, a year later she was accepted at the prestigious National Academy of Dramatic Arts of Serbia, after auditioning with nearly 1000 candidates, in the class of the renown professor Gordana Maric. She completed the four years endeavor ahead of time with excellence and an award 'Branivoj Djordjevic' for best student in diction.

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Notes On Ecumenism

St. Abba Justin Popovich - Notes on ecumenism

Written in 1972 by St. Abba Justin Popovich, edited by Bishop Athanasius Yevtich, translated from Serbian by Aleksandra Stojanovich, and proofread by Fr Miroljub Ruzich

Abba Justin’s manuscript legacy (on which Bishop Athanasius have been working for a couple of years preparing an edition of The Complete Works ), also includes a parcel of sheets/small sheets of paper (in the 1/4 A4 size) with the notes on Ecumenism (written in pencil and dating from the period when he was working on his book “The Orthodox Church and Ecumenism”; there are also references to the writings of St. Bishop Nikolai [Velimirovich], short excerpts copied from his Sermons, some of which were quoted in the book).

The editor presents the Notes authentically, as he has found them in the manuscripts (his words inserted in the text, as clarification, are put between the slashes /…/; all the footnotes are ours).—In the appendix are present the facsimiles of the majority of Abba’s Notes which were supposed to be included in his book On Ecumenism (written in haste then, but now significantly supplemented with these Notes. The Notes make evident the full extent of Justin’s profundity as a theologian and ecclesiologist of the authentic Orthodoxy).—The real Justin is present in these Notes: by his original language, style, literature, polemics, philosophy, theology, and above all by his confession of the God-man Christ and His Church. He confesses his faith, tradition, experience and his perspective on man, on the world and on Europe—invariably in the Church and from the Church, in the God-man Christ and from Him, just as he did in all of his writings and in his entire life and theologizing.

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