Bumper Cars

Artist Statement:

The exhibit, to mark the 25th anniversary of the Chornobyl nuclear disaster, shows Chornobyl itself and surrounding regions, as they exist today. The photos were taken by Newton resident and internationally noted photographer Tania Mychajlyshyn-D’Avignon.

In the spring of 1986 D’Avignon was part of a National Geographic team assigned to produce a photo exxay on the Ukrainian SSR (National Geographic, May 1987).

Artist Biography:

Tania Mychajlyshun-D’Avignon is a native of Lviv, Ukraine. Her family fled the city in 1944. She grew up in Baltimore, Maryland and attended the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) earning a BFA. She also did graduate work in sociology at John Hopkins University. She was a semi-finalist for the Ukrainian national Shevchenko Prize for Journalism in 2000 and also was a Fulbright Scholar in Ukraine in 2002-2003.

D’Avignon has taken photographs around the world. She has been a guest of the government of the People’s Republic of China three times and was granted permission to photograph in the remote provinces of south bordering Tibet (the Kham Region), in the Tibetan Autonomous Region, in Inner Mongolia, and in Sichuan. She has done work in Uzbekistan, and at the invitation of the Uzbeki Ministry of culture participated in their Biannales. She has also worked in the Russian far-east and has also photographed in Africa.