Center Austria and the UNO School of the Arts, in cooperation with the Austrian Embassy in Washington, DC, is presenting the exhibit “Austrians in the United States” at the UNO Fine Arts Gallery from August 15 to August 31, 2019).
A Vernissage was held on Thursday, August 22, 4:00 PM, at the UNO Fine Arts Gallery (Photos below).
All photos by Jacqueline Wieser
This exhibit presents the larger trajectory of U.S. – Austrian relations along with many portrait of Austrians who came as immigrants to the U.S. The illustrious groups of Austrians coming to this country reached from the “Salzburgers” (a group of Protestant miners kicked out by the Catholic Archbishop of Salzburg due to their faith) to the roughly 3,5 million people who migrated from the Habsburg Monarchy (from 1876 to 1910).
Austrians came to Southern California and had an impact as creators in film (Otto Preminger, Billy Wilder, Hedy Lamar), winning dozens of Oscars, and architecture (most notably Richard Neutra, Victor Gruen, Rudolph Schindler). The Jews were expelled by the Nazis from Vienna in and after 1938 “Anschluss” and 30,000 came to the U.S., among them many famous academics – economists (Josef Schumpeter, Friedrich v. Hayek—a Nobel Prize winner), physicists (Victor Weisskopf) and sociologists (Karl Lazarsfeld).
After World War II some 5,000 Austrian women came to the U.S. as “GI-brides”; there was nary a ski resort in the U.S. that was not started by an Austrian. Today the director of the Metropolitan Museum is an Austrian (Max Hollein), famous chefs like Wolfgang Puck are Austrian-born, and so are researchers like Norbert Bischofberger and Nobel Prize winners Eric Kandel (Columbia) and Martin Karplus (Harvard).
