![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/IMG_5106-1024x533.jpeg\")
Painting of The Rosen Sisterrz by Hinda Avery<\/p>\nThe women are impossible to ignore\u2014except that few people have ever actually seen them.<\/p>\n
Rolled into more than a dozen giant cylinders in Vancouver artist Hinda Avery\u2019s basement studio are nine-foot-by-six-foot paintings of grinning, elderly Jewish women in garish dresses and bikinis, toting automatic rifles through scenes inspired by the Holocaust, casually and crudely plotting Hitler\u2019s demise.<\/p>\n
Avery calls them the Rosen Sisterrrz. For more than two decades, they have kept her company.<\/p>\n
Petite and self-deprecating, Avery speaks thoughtfully about art, feminism, history and social justice, her understated style belying a wicked sense of humour. Now, at 86 and living with her latest bout of cancer, she no longer has the strength to unroll the giant canvases herself. Even so, she is matter-of-fact about what is now her life\u2019s goal.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019d love to have a show before I die.\u201d<\/p>\n
A lifetime of challenging assumptions<\/p>\n
Long before she began imagining the Rosen Sisterrrz, Avery had spent her life questioning accepted ways of seeing the world.<\/p>\n
A self-described lifelong feminist, she helped launch Vancouver\u2019s Women\u2019s Centre in the late 1960s, when women\u2019s bookstores, galleries and political organizing were reshaping the city\u2019s cultural landscape.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was a time of euphoria and excitement,\u201d she recalls. \u201cIt was a reawakening for all of us.\u201d<\/p>\n
Avery studied Fine Art at the University of Victoria and UBC before becoming one of the region\u2019s early instructors in Women\u2019s Studies. In her 50s, she earned a doctorate, with research on architecture and urban planning. Her work examined how the built environment reflected, and often ignored, the needs and experiences of women.<\/p>\n
Looking back, Avery sees many of the ideas that were once dismissed as radical\u2014safer public spaces, more green space, more thoughtful urban design\u2014have since entered the mainstream.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat is good for women,\u201d she says, \u201cis good for everyone.\u201d<\/p>\n
That instinct\u2014to challenge conventional thinking and imagine alternatives\u2014would later shape her art as profoundly as it had her academic career. Rather than painting Jewish women as history remembered them, Avery painted them as she wished they could have been: fearless, funny and gloriously impossible to intimidate.<\/p>\n
The women she never knew<\/p>\n
Avery never met two of the women she was painting.<\/p>\n
Her mother left Poland before the Second World War. Two of her brothers, who had immigrated to Canada, agreed to sponsor her because they believed she could attract a husband. But they refused to sponsor their younger sister, Avery\u2019s aunt.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey believed she wasn\u2019t pretty and wouldn\u2019t find a husband, and she\u2019d be a financial burden,\u201d Avery says.<\/p>\n
Her aunt remained in Poland, where she married and had twins. She, her husband and the children were all murdered by the Nazis, along with Avery\u2019s grandparents and other relatives.<\/p>\n
After retiring in 1993, Avery travelled to her mother\u2019s hometown of Stasz\u00f3w, near Krakow, hoping to learn more about the family she hadn\u2019t known. She visited museums, concentration camps and memorials throughout Poland but found almost nothing about her own relatives.<\/p>\n
\u201cI never knew my grandmother, my aunt or the other women in my family who had been murdered,\u201d she says. \u201cI decided I needed a connection with them.\u201d<\/p>\n
She had only a couple of faded photographs.<\/p>\n
\u201cI thought one way we could be connected would be to paint them.\u201d<\/p>\n
Painting of The Rosen Sisterrz by Hinda Avery<\/p>\n
Reimagining the Rosen Women<\/p>\n
Beginning in 2005, Avery painted her grandmother, aunt, mother and herself<\/a>, first as vulnerable, naked prisoners in Nazi concentration camps. But the paintings refused to stay there.<\/p>\n \u201cI got tired of the women being victims,\u201d she says. \u201cI wanted them to have some fun.\u201d<\/p>\n They escaped to the forests and became partisan fighters inspired by the Zionist youth movement Hashomer Hatzair, which resisted the Nazis and helped lead the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. The drab uniforms and bleak surroundings gradually gave way to dazzling colours. The women acquired automatic weapons. Friends joined the group. The grim expressions broadened to wide smiles.<\/p>\n Eventually, the women became the Rosen Sisterrrz\u2014joyful, wisecracking feminist avengers whose speech balloons gleefully detailed their plans for Hitler\u2019s downfall. Avery patterned several of the compositions after historic Holocaust photographs, replacing terrified victims with her grinning Sisterrrz. She depicted them as medics rescuing a wounded comrade, as burlesque queens, as sci-fi fighters aiming laser guns.<\/p>\n The canvases grew with the women\u2019s confidence\u2014from three-foot squares to monumental nine-by-six-foot paintings. By this point, the women\u2014now known as \u201cThe Resisterzzz\u201d\u2014had traded battlefields for outer space, where they were victorious astronauts, intercepting Hitler\u2019s imagined quest to conquer the heavens.<\/p>\n The contradictions in Avery\u2019s paintings are jarring. These kindly looking grandmothers aren\u2019t baking cookies or reading bedtime stories. Instead, they\u2019re forces of nature in chartreuse and fuchsia, hurling expletives at the Nazis. The Sisterrrz exude such confidence, joy and mischievous delight that the paintings invite viewers to be inspired and to thrive in the face of adversity\u2014and to have a hell of a time, while at it.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019ve never known the Rosen Sisterrrz to be depressed,\u201d she says. \u201cI wanted the women to be this caricature\u2014crazy, sweet, smiling, feminist Wonder Women having the time of their lives.\u201d<\/p>\n Women with guns<\/p>\n The paintings have never fit comfortably into any category, and Avery understands why they make some viewers uneasy. Still, she can\u2019t help noting that if her painting subjects had been male, the weapons would have gone unmentioned.<\/p>\n \u201cI was told guns are not \u2018nice,\u2019\u201d Avery recalls. \u201cMy argument was that the women needed weapons to deal with Hitler.\u201d<\/p>\n Others accused Avery of trivializing the Holocaust through dark humour, a criticism she rejects.<\/p>\n \u201cThere is still that hesitation\u2014that my work is too far out, that it\u2019s too big a leap from the seriousness of the Holocaust to the absurd humour.\u201d<\/p>\n But to Avery, the paintings gave her agency, allowing her to reclaim a history that otherwise might well have crushed her.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was really art therapy to create these women,\u201d she says. \u201cAs I painted them, I felt that I, too, was a resister. I, too, was confident. I, too, wasn\u2019t afraid.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cFor me, it was sort of a saving grace,\u201d she says. \u201cTo live with the Holocaust as it happened can turn a person crazy.\u201d<\/p>\n Hinda and her Sisterrrz<\/p>\n Documentary filmmaker Michael Kissinger first met Avery while he was working as an editor at the now-defunct Vancouver Courier. Avery repeatedly contacted him, hoping someone would help tell the story behind her unusual work. When he first saw her paintings, he remembers stopping in surprise.<\/p>\n \u201cI was staring at these elderly women holding machine guns,\u201d he recalls. \u201cI thought, \u2018Wow\u2014this isn\u2019t your typical pictures of seagulls.’\u201d<\/p>\n The encounter led first to a short video and an article for the Courier. A year or two later, with the help of a grant Avery received from the Canadian Arts Council, Kissinger made 2017\u2019s Hinda and Her Sisterrrz. \u00a0The documentary <\/a>first screened at the Vancouver Jewish Film Festival and went on to be an official selection at the Jewish film festivals of Toronto, San Francisco, Boston and Victoria.<\/p>\n He believes the paintings transformed alongside Avery herself.<\/p>\n \u201cShe got sick and tired of feeling like a victim,\u201d he says. \u201cShe wanted herself and her family to become the heroic avengers of the story, and they\u2019re having fun while they\u2019re doing it.\u201d<\/p>\n Saying goodbye to the Sisterrrz<\/p>\n The Rosen Women\u2019s journey was now complete, with the astronauts.<\/p>\n What surprised Avery was how deeply she mourned their departure. After spending more than a decade painting the women, they had become the family she had spent years creating.<\/p>\n \u201cI had been hanging out with these Rosen women for so many years. They were real characters in my mind that I was having this relationship with,\u201d she says. \u201cIt was a real loss for me.\u201d<\/p>\n Avery sank into a depression for a time afterward. Then, the end to the Sisterrrz eventually gave birth to another character.<\/p>\n Enter Bayla<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Bayla1-2-666x1024-1.jpg\")
Comic by Hinda Avery<\/p>\n