Boris Lurie's Holocaust trauma explored in Houston exhibition of early works

Holocaust Museum Houston presents "Boris Lurie: Nothing To Do But To Try," an exhibition organized by New York City's Museum of Jewish Heritage and curated by Sara Softness. The show focuses on Lurie's earliest War Series, created after his 1946 arrival in New York, featuring never-before-exhibited objects and ephemera. Born in Leningrad, Russia, and raised in Riga, Latvia, Lurie survived the Holocaust and later co-founded the anti-art-establishment movement NO!art with Stanley Fisher and Sam Goodman in 1959. The exhibition uniquely excludes NO!art works to concentrate on how Lurie processed trauma through art, despite having no formal training—he stated his art education came from camps like Buchenwald. Works span from 1945 onward, including Portrait of My Mother Before Shooting (1947), which depicts his mother's murder in the Rumbula Forest along with his grandmother, sister, girlfriend, and approximately 25,000 other Jews. Later pieces like Concentration Camp Prisoners (circa 1970) and In Concentration Camp (1971) maintain visceral intensity decades after the war. The exhibition concludes with Lurie's 2003 Ax Series, tree stumps with axes referencing forced labor in the Riga Ghetto, positioned before a photograph of Rumbula Forest. Archival materials include maps marking burial sites and memories in Riga, with red dots for happy memories and red crosses for negative ones. The show runs through July 19, 2026.