HAVING GROWN UP IN COMMUNIST ROMANIA, SHE LEARNED SURVIVAL SKILLS THAT ARE HANDY NOW IN TRUMP’S AMERICA

Published on June 9, 2025

Editor’s note: We first met the New York City-based visual artist and performer Ella Veres in brutjournal’s May-June 2023 issue in our report about the exhibition “Mushrooms,” which she had curated for Fountain House Gallery in Manhattan. That venue is part of an organization that, through a clubhouse model, includes art-making facilities and a gallery. It offers a community setting for people affected by mental illness.

Later in 2023, we published Veres’s report about her performance-art piece “Earth Burial,” in which, out on Governors Island, in New York Harbor, she invited passers-by to cover her body, as she lay on the grass, with large, blue-glass bottles.

Veres, who also goes by the moniker “vermilion,” was born and brought up in communist-controlled Romania. She immigrated to the United States in 1998. Having experienced many traumatic events over the course of her life’s journey, she long ago discovered solace — and the healing, liberating power of self-expression — in art, language, and storytelling.