How My Mother’s Childhood Doodle Wound Up in the Venice Biennale and Why I Removed It

“A five-year-old could do that.” It’s what crosses our minds at one time or another while staring at an artwork without understanding its context. And the fact that my mother’s childhood doodle appeared at the world’s most important contemporary art show this year might seem to lend the thought credence.

Of course my mother was no ordinary five-year-old. In 1943 she was attending New York’s newly opened, experimental public school, Hunter College Elementary. In a 1948 profile, titled “Genius School,” LIFE magazine heralded it as “the only institution in the U.S. devoted entirely to the teaching and study of gifted children,” reporting that the average IQ of its three- to eleven-year-old students was 150.

But a little over a decade later, my first-generation born American grandparents’ hopes for their promising only child were dashed when, after graduating high school at the age of 16 and receiving a full scholarship to study English at the University of Chicago, my mother experienced her first episode of psychosis, and attempted suicide by swallowing a bottle of pills. Thus began my mother’s life-long battle with schizophrenia. During periods of remission she would attend college, hold a job, date, and write poetry.

Among the many things that I learned from my mother, when she was well enough to be at home with us, three stand out: It’s OK for boys to cry; be proud to be a Jew; and fight against injustice. I tell autobiographical stories, informed by my queer, Jewish identity, which, I hope, move from the particular to the universal, and resonate with the ongoing struggle for social justice.

In the summer of 2019, I had the honor of accompanying the pioneering performance artist, the late Robbie McCauley, to Denniston Hill, an institution located in New York’s Catskill region dedicated to supporting queer and BIPOC artists. Robbie was receiving their Distinguished Performance Artist Award. After a lifetime of telling stories from her and her family’s African American experience, Robbie had decided to create a piece at Denniston Hill that would put those stories in conversation with my own, and those of our third collaborator, a young, Taiwanese immigrant of Hoklo and indigenous descent. Our stories were of different generations, races, ethnicities, religions and sexual orientations, but Robbie heard them like jazz and, in her inimitable way, wove them together.

Thrilled by our trio’s synergy, Robbie was inspired to create the theater company All Three to continue our collective work. While hampered by the COVID-19 pandemic, and brought to an end by Robbie’s death in 2021, I continue to draw lessons from our collaboration that inform my current performance practice.

In 2025 Denniston Hill was chosen by the late Koyo Kouoh, the first African woman to curate the Venice Biennale, as one of the 110 contributors to its 2026 central, “In Minor Keys,” exhibit. Denniston Hill’s group show, “Chimera,” is currently on view at the Central Pavilion in the Giardini at the 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, running from May 9 through Nov. 22, 2026. Their take on the Surrealist exquisite corpse, it is composed of 153 small works by Denniston alumni stacked like totems in groups of three or four.

During our 2019 performance at Denniston I had entered wearing a surgical mask and rubber gloves. Little did I know that within a few months’ time COVID-19 would make this costume de rigueur. Carrying a box of letters, I stopped, set it down, removed my mask, and said, “The toxicity of the past.” The line reflected both the perhaps literal toxicity of the moldy and mildewed papers I had inherited, as well as the figurative toxicity of some of their content.

Carrying a box of letters, I stopped, set it down, removed my mask, and said, “The toxicity of the past.”

As I told a story about my mother, I pulled from the box a piece of notebook paper, now encased in a transparent protective sleeve, and handed it to an audience member to be passed around. On one side of the page my mother had written two series of increasing numbers in alternating rows: 11, 22, 33, 44, 55 and 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, etc. Beneath the numerals she had drawn two pictures in profile of a man with an odd haircut, a small moustache, and lines emanating from his mouth. On the reverse she had drawn a larger picture of this man surrounded by the words, “Mister Hitler is invaded and his spitting.”

The image reflected, for me, the way in which something as toxic as Hitler had even “invaded” a small child’s imagination. It seemed to me that just as my mother, at the age of five, was observing the patterns of increasing numbers, she was trying to process a spitting-mad Hitler. For my submission for the Biennale I transferred the images from both sides of my mother’s notebook page onto an acetate panel, placing them side by side, so that they could be viewed simultaneously and beneath them wrote, in red, “Mom’s childhood drawing 1943. The Toxicity of the Past?”

I felt like the piece reflected the work I did at Denniston Hill while, at the same time, gesturing toward our current moment. Neither the “toxicity” of authoritarian leaders nor the rabid antisemitism called to mind by Hitler’s image remain in the past. Little did I know how directly I would soon be confronted with the 21st century’s incarnation of the latter.

Thinking of my mother’s doodle with my comment on it as an artistic collaboration across generations, I wondered what my grandmother, a successful commercial artist who trained as a fine artist at The Cooper Union in the 1910s, and The Art Students League in the 1920s and 1930s, would make of it. And I marveled at the fact that the product of my mother’s, perhaps absent-minded, doodling at the age of five had found its way, 83 years later, to the most important contemporary art exhibit in the world.

I looked forward to the show’s opening and to seeing it while traveling in Europe this past summer. But my enthusiasm turned to nausea when I received an email in mid-May stating that, “As an organization, Denniston Hill signed the letter from the artists and curators of In Minor Keys to the Biennale administration, aligning with ANGA [the Art Not Genocide Alliance] and calling out the United States and Russia.”

While the email did not mention Israel, the link Denniston provided revealed ANGA’s letter to be all about Israel and calls for its exclusion from the Biennale. The signatories claim, “We are committed to an active decolonial practice of anti-racist politics and human rights.” One finds all the catch phrases and calumnies one would expect on ANGA’s website: “Zionist atrocities,” “Zionist genocide and ongoing apartheid,” “colonial violence” and “imperial domination.”

But ANGA’s true goal is revealed in its “Guide to Complicity and Protest,” where, in a section titled “Colonialist Expansion,” ANGA refers to what it calls Israel’s “78-year occupation of Palestine.” ANGA clearly considers all of Israel to be occupied Palestine and its goal is not to oppose policies of the government of Israel but to destroy the nation.

ANGA clearly considers all of Israel to be occupied Palestine and its goal is not to oppose policies of the government of Israel but to destroy the nation.

I wondered if by “align[ing] with ANGA,” Denniston Hill also believes that Jews do not have a right to self-determination within any border of their ancestral home. I recalled their October 2025 letter inviting me to participate: “Rather than speaking for our community, we want the Venice Biennale installation to emerge from the voices and experiences of the artists who have made Denniston Hill what it is. Your contribution will become an installation that truly represents the collaborative spirit of our residency.”

How strange, I thought, that when it comes to the country in which one half of the world’s Jewish population lives, Denniston Hill has no problem blithely aligning itself with an organization that seeks that nation’s eradication without even asking for the opinions of its artists.

I remembered being nine years old on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, running with my mother from temple to temple trying to find a place with enough space on the Jewish New Year for nonmembers of the congregation to hear the shofar being blown. I thought about her taking me with her to demonstrate for Soviet Jewry in front of the Soviet Mission, chanting, “1-2-3-4 Open up the iron door! 5-6-7-8, let our people emigrate!” And I reflected on a poem my mother had written in 1972, after Palestinian terrorists of the Black September Organization massacred 11 Israeli athletes at the Munich summer Olympics, with the repeated verse, “Then they should come for me too.” She understood that the athletes were not murdered because they were Israelis; they, like the peaceniks in Israel’s kibbutzim neighboring Gaza, or the young people at the Nova Dance Festival, were murdered because they were Jews. She knew that whether we are in New York, or the Soviet Union, or in Israel that we are one people.

My residency at Denniston Hill was part of their multi-year theme, “Exodus.” Their group show invitation letter stated, “Our goal is to create a “collective chorus,” mirroring the ways that Denniston Hill functions as a place of work, albeit one embedded in friendship and in the communities of diaspora.” Three of Denniston’s co-founders are even interviewed in the Fall 2023 issue of MIT’s arts journal “October” on “Diaspora and Modernity,” so it should be a concept they understand fully.

The words “Exodus” and “Diaspora” are borrowed from Greek and entered the English language as a result of the translation of the Bible, their primary meanings defined respectively as, “The title of the book of the Old Testament that relates the departure of the Israelites out of Egypt” and “The body of Jews living outside the land of Israel; the countries and places inhabited by these, regarded collectively; the dispersion of the Jewish people beyond the land of Israel.” But, as anti-Zionism is an assault on not only the Jewish state and Jewish history, but also on language itself, it requires some words to be denuded of their Jewish origin, while others are misapplied.

It is hard to imagine the mental gymnastics required for an organization like Denniston that draws inspiration from Jewish history to align itself with the Cold War KGB propaganda that linked Zionism with racism, colonialism and apartheid. War is a horror. But to call the Jewish state’s attempt to protect itself after the greatest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust—perpetrated by an avowed genocidal terror group that is the proxy of the genocidal Islamic Republic of Iran, and which vows to repeat its genocidal acts again and again—“genocide” while citing the opinion of a group that calls itself “The International Association of Genocide Scholars” but that one may join by simply paying $30, is so convoluted it’s Kafkaesque.

As I said in my performance at Denniston Hill, “In Hebrew the book of Exodus is called ‘Shemot’ which means ‘Names.’ And it begins with a list of names. ‘These are the names of the sons of Israel who came to Egypt with Jacob…’ Exodus is called the book of names because to know where you are going you gotta know where you’ve been.”

I know where I have been, and as one who has heard the call of the shofar, I am awakened from my complacency. Sometimes you can’t appreciate a piece of contemporary art without understanding its context. I wrote a lengthy email response to Denniston Hill. It concluded: “Please return my artwork as soon as possible.”

The Board of Denniston Hill acceded to my demand. I informed them that I “safely received the return of my artwork, along with a piece of my dignity.” And I am left wondering if words will become mere pentimenti of a time when they held meaning.

Eric Rasmussen is an actor, director, storyteller and devised theater maker. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts and is writing a memoir about growing up in an unconventional Jewish family on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.