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To many, art is shared through traditional forms such as painting and sculptures, but Rick Delaney, the exhibitions director of the new gallery titled Women of the Book: Jewish Artists, Jewish Themes, explains in his gallery program that artists’ books emerged in the latter half of the 20th century as an original expression of art. The exhibition challenges visitors “to think about how the words, pictures, and physical form of the object all contribute to the meaning.” The original Women of the Book exhibit opened in 1997 in West Hills, CA, and has since traveled around the country, constantly updating its collection with new works and artists. Through book form, these Jewish female artists not only establish their connection with Judaism, but also comment on universal themes of courage, family and morality.
When exploring this exhibit, one is struck both by the variety of the pieces and the larger messages represented. The diversity among all the pieces, from a focus on family, the Holocaust, Bible texts, comparative religion, Zionism, prayer and more, the books represent the variety of Jewish thought, practice and experience in the current Jewish American discourse. Each book engages with Jewish tradition in a unique and sometimes unorthodox way, and many are informed by modern philosophies, such as feminism, multiculturalism and the value of interfaith dialogue.
While every work was not easily categorized, some central themes emerge throughout the exhibition. The first theme, and one of the strongest connections most Jewish Americans have to their Judaism, is family. Dyed and Parted, a hanging watercolor on paper, provides a close up bird’s-eye view of two parallel thick heads of hair, dyed unusual hair colors (green and purple) and parted down the middle. Io Palmer explains that she was attempting to showcase the eccentric personalities of some of her relatives. Wolf at the Door is a depiction of the artist’s apartment building growing up with a scary animal figure almost swallowing it whole. Stephanie Brody-Lederman explains that because money was always a worry, the wolf was a constant threat; stating, “the work engulfed my home.” Although there was nothing explicitly Jewish in these two works of art, it is a strong statement that multiple artists related to their Judaism through expressions of family; this is truly representative of American Jews. The overwhelming presence of a family theme is emblematic of the way American Jews understand themselves. Judaism is a family-oriented religion, and both observant and non-observant Jews connect with their religion by connecting to their roots.
The second prevalent theme of the exhibit is the Holocaust, which is the formative event for Jews today, including the vast majority of Jews who weren’t alive during that horrific era. Barbara Milman created the book Berlin on hand-printed linocuts based on interviews she did with Holocaust survivors, each page containing a haunting quote from the interviews and an image she drew representing it. Although Milman is not a Holocaust survivor, she uses the theme to relate to her Jewish heritage. In Remember Babi Yar, the artist Marilyn R. Rosenberg is even more explicit, with scattered yellow stars (which the Nazis made Jews wear to identify them), photographs, and a cut out of the word REMEMBER. In her program explanation, she clearly connects the two; “I am a Jew. …So I remember, I feel, I must tell about the Holocaust.” The living memory of the Holocaust as exemplified by these artists, among the others, represents the way many young American Jews think of the Holocaust— as something they themselves survived, even though they were born after the event. First and second-generation American Jews cannot escape the chilling knowledge that had their families not escaped from Europe, they would never have been born.
The third theme is Biblical and extra-Biblical text as it relates to Jewish women. Many, if not most, of the pieces of art in the exhibit relate to the canonical works of the TaNaKH (the Torah or five books of Moses, books of the Prophets, and other holy scripture) and their commentaries, and many of those, in turn, related to the critical way they see women’s roles in the Bible and Jewish texts. One, …and a still small voice (an allusion to a verse in Kings I), showed artist Carrie Ungerman’s frustration with both the lack of named women in the Bible and the traditional law prohibiting women from writing Torah scrolls. In formal script, she wrote the name of every Biblical woman on traditional parchment and inserted them into the Bible she received at her Confirmation. Her discomfort with the Biblical approach to women is echoed in The Lilith Scroll. Lilith, a character only alluded to in the Torah and explored in its exegetical texts, has been rebranded in recent years as the sexual female who was exploited by the patriarchal Torah narrative and was been edited out of the texts. Sophia Rosenberg, through photographs of herself in dark and dramatic make-up and costumes placed next to blocked text all on a long scroll (reminiscent of Torah scrolls), show the silencing of Lilith. The theme of the silencing of women in the Biblical texts could be found again and again throughout the exhibition.
Of course, some pieces defied categorization. Perhaps one of the most unusual pieces was The Transgenic Bagel, which drew on ancient Biblical tradition as well as the modern day study of genetics to create a comprehensive tongue-in-cheek critique both of modern Biblical scholarship as well as biologically based notions of femininity. The artist, Sonya Rapaport, based her work on the assumption that the animals on Noah’s Ark comprised the first gene pool, and every animal in this virtual ark has a character trait associated with a character from Genesis. While potentially confusing it worked well in the exhibit.
Many pieces, while worth a look, were merely odd and some seemed out of place— such as (JCMCJJ/Dancers on a Plane VI, a steel wool book with text based on the writings of John Cage. The promised Jewish theme seems to have been lost with this one. But most works fit beautifully. The gallery was not organized by theme, letting the visitors peruse and judge the works for themselves.
**All artist quotations are taken from the gallery program.**
Women of the Book
The Park School
2425 Old Court Rd.
Baltimore, MD 21208
Monday-Friday 8 AM-6 PM, until April 14th, 2011.
http://www.parkschool.net/more.cfm?objectid=880
http://www.rickdelaney.com/WOTBcatalogueSM.pdf
(410) 339-7070 ext 4333
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