“This project started two years ago with my personal sketchbook,” Weems told Jewcy. “I had decided to spend time studying the parsha each week and translating it into my own visual language. It was sometimes a challenge to keep up with it on top of my regular painting and illustration jobs, but I managed to get through the cycle of an entire year… I had been wanting to rework my sketchbook ideas into finished pieces for a while, and when a venue contacted me to book a spring exhibit, I decided that now is a good time.”

Some of the sketches she has simply recreated as watercolors, but for others she started fresh. Almost through with the series (she’s been sharing her progress on Tumblr), Weems is going to compile them into a book. But in the meantime, you can buy individual prints online; if it’s not available yet, it’s about to be (know a Bar or Bat Mitzvah kid? Gift them the art for their Torah portion).

Some portions, of course, seem easier to depict than others. Not every parsha is as eventful as the story of Noah’s ark (not that Weems’s Noah piece actually contains an ark), after all— after a certain point, they tend to involve desert wandering and lists of laws.

“When I was doing the original sketches, the ones towards the end definitely became more abstract and/or symbolic,” said Weems. “For example, my sketch for Metzora was inspired by what cedar wood looks like under a microscope. I just use the mental imagery that stands out most to me.”

The exhibit of Weems’s work, at Lowe Mill ARTS & Entertainment in Huntsville, runs from April 13 to June 1, 2018.

All image courtesy of Starr Weems.

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If you’re not salivating yet, you’re not a huge nerd, and shame on you. Just check out just a few of these gems:

This is a contemporary (2007) kiddush cup by an Israeli artist that looks like a chicken. What are you going to do with this? Make kiddush on matzo ball soup? Put on a little puppet show? Who knows! Either way, amazing:

Or, there’s nothing quite like an illuminated manuscript, straddling the line between beautifully surreal and absurd to the point of being silly. And of course, it wasn’t only monks going at it— the Index includes Jewish illuminated manuscripts, and at times they’re just as weird as their Christian counterparts:

WHAT IS THAT THING ON THE TOP? Some sort of centaur with a dragon head for a tail that really likes the music the reverse human top part plays, while an additional face sticks out of the chest? Here. For. It.

Not everything is funny, of course; there’s an entire section featuring cemeteries, a different kind of fascinating (this one, for example, is from 18th century Ukraine).

Plus, nearly half of the quarter-million images are related to architecture (“We cannot physically preserve all Jewish buildings everywhere, but we can preserve them visually through documentation and drawings,” said Dr. Vladmir Levin, the Center for Jewish Art’s director, in a statement).

The database does have a search function, but it’s more fun to just lose yourself in a hole, classic Internet-surfing style. There are detailed descriptions of every entry to provide context.

So, choose your poison. Beautiful early twentieth century painting of Jewish life? Medieval interpretations of Biblical stories? Modern sculpture of the very same story (you can compare them!)? More blueprints than you can shake a lulav at?

Work can wait. See you in several hours.

Images courtesy the Bezalel Narkiss Index of Jewish Art

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The fifth annual Stern College Senior Art Exhibition, on display at Yeshiva University Museum through July 13, showcases the work of this year’s graduating Studio Art major. The theme, fitting for a student show, is “In Progress,” and it is the process of creation itself that is being celebrated. The senior exhibition is the culmination of the students’ education up to this point—even the design of the display is largely the work of an exhibition design class.

Framed with blue tape to emphasize their ever-developing nature, the pieces that line the walls of the space are as diverse as their creators. Utilizing a range of different media, from painting to sculpture to film, the young artists offer glimpses into their varied sources of inspiration. Jewish identity and connection to Israel is a recurring theme: Emily Wolmark‘s digital prints, for example, put a modern spin on posters created by Israeli tourism agencies in the 1950s and 60s. Victoria Chabot’s Visual Text uses pen and graphite on paper to arrange biblical verse in striking visual patterns that correspond with the theme of the text. Chabot says her piece allows her to combine her two greatest loves, art and the study of Torah: “The Tanakh is filled with such depth and such beauty, and I wanted to relay that in images.”

Some artists have cast a creative eye on their local environs, with paintings of New York City buildings, and photographs of streets and subway stations. Some pieces hark back to the past, others are rooted in the present: from Esther Hersh’s sculptures, which are reminiscent of ancient Greek discus throwers, to a typographic poster series by Adina Eizikovitz Rubin called The Hate List, which lists aggravations such as “When websites don’t tell you if it’s your username or password that’s wrong” and “Please swipe again.”

The Yeshiva University Museum is located at the Center for Jewish History, close to Union Square, which allows the artists to access a wider New York audience who may not be familiar with Stern’s creative output. Says faculty member and curator Traci Tullius, “This group of really deep thinking, creative young women are making art. I think a lot of people don’t even know that Stern has an art department, let alone one that’s as ambitious and contemporary as ours is.” In fact, with 23 graduates this year, the Studio Art program is one of the college’s most popular majors.

Tullius has been with the students since the beginning of their creative process, and she described the delight of witnessing the transformation from “the potential you saw in the student and what they were doing” to “seeing it come out of that messy studio and in the context of a white walled gallery.”

Indeed, the students openly invite us into their messy studios: in a display outside of the exhibition, photographs show the complex works stripped down to their most basic parts. We see the preliminary sketches behind large canvases, as well as diagrams and scribbled notes that would later be turned into intricate multidimensional works. The camera is flipped on completed films; now, the actors and directors stand smiling on set. Looking at these images turns the viewer from a distant observer into a participant in the process of creation. This celebration of the artistic process points to the lovely theme of humility that characterizes the show. The artists don’t minimize the fact that they are students just starting out on their journeys, both artistic and personal. They invite us to share in every step of their growth thus far, but they also remind us that what we see is only the beginning.

Isabel Fattal is a student at Wesleyan College and an intern at Tablet Magazine.

(Image courtesy of Yeshiva University Museum)

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28-year-old artist Michael Levin has always used concepts of Jewish identity as inspiration, whether it was building a shrine to the apocryphal “Red Jews” or painting on shaimos, aka “retired” pieces of scripture. His newest series, Jews of Today, features arresting, intricately detailed depictions of Hasidim in Williamsburg, and is on display starting tomorrow at 7 Dunham Gallery in South Williamsburg. He’s also publishing Jews of Today, an illustrated primer on Hasidic dress, in conjunction with the exhibit.

In the series, Levin zeroes in on the sartorial aspects of Hasidic culture: various styles of beaver hats, the ornate robes worn by the Satmar rebbes, and the “rebbish” hems of shirts worn by boys from prominent families. While his fascination with his pious neighbors borders on reverence, his outsider status and sense of humor keeps the work from becoming a strict homage. I talked to Levin about Italian conversos, Tay-Sachs, Plato, and Orientalism.

Where did you grow up? What is your Jewish background? Was your family observant?

I grew up in Los Angeles, born and raised. Only my father’s family is Jewish; my mother is from an Italian Catholic family in San Francisco, and converted when she married my dad. Of course, there is much speculation about her family origins. Her maiden name is Bonfilio, which is a common name for Italian conversos (Jews who converted to Catholicism during the inquisition).

Regardless, having a mixed background while being raised with a strong Jewish consciousness—a term I use because we were not, nor am I now, religiously observant in any significant way—brought up a lot of issues. For one, friends would constantly say I wasn’t really Jewish, because my mother wasn’t born Jewish. This wasn’t said maliciously at all, just in that casual way that can really stick with you. It was often followed by the acknowledgement that I was the most “Jewish” of all of our friends anyway (in some intangible way that I also could sense but never understand). I guess it got me thinking from an early age about what constitutes “Jewishness,” what that je ne sais quoi is that can make someone so Jewish even without the risk of Tay-Sachs—or without even keeping kosher.

You studied Classics at the University of Chicago. Does this influence your work at all?

I have always been an artist, but not a committed one until my early twenties, after University of Chicago had made an intellectual of me. My studies do inform my painting, but more in terms of big ideas and ways of thinking. I don’t sit down to paint thinking about Plato, but I do think about the issues that interested me in the classics, which centered around the process of cultural exchange and integration, and ways of constructing the insider/outsider dynamic.

When did you move to Williamsburg?

I moved to South 2nd and Bedford in January 2007, about six months after graduating. At that time this was still on the outskirts of what young college grads thought of as “Williamsburg.” I started seeing Hasidim around here and there, and, after deciding to commit myself as an artist, they became the center of my work. At Chicago we were always trained to find “problems”—more like questions that carry the flavor of something wrong or amiss—and make them the starting point for any research. So because of this training, I got very little out of painting landscapes or self-portraits. Hasidim were the only subjects in my view that constituted a “problem” for me. So my painting became a kind of extension of my academic study, and Hasidim a new subject for the same set of questions I had already been dealing with, only now in a more personal sphere, because of my abiding difficulties in establishing my own Jewish identity. Add to that how strangely arresting and beautiful the Hasidic look is, to me at least, and there you have the genesis of this work.

Do you draw mostly from memory? What I’m trying to ask here is: how much skulking around Williamsburg do you do?

It’s almost all from memory, but the way I get my memories is by skulking around Williamsburg, a lot. Part of the reason I’m going to Pratt next year for my MFA and not somewhere else is that I can walk there, and that walk takes me right through the heart of the Hasidic neighborhood. I don’t take pictures of people on the street. I take pictures from my window sometimes, but putting a camera in someone’s face doesn’t feel right to me. Painting is my alternative, a way to preserve my memories and also push my conceptual agenda into them.

Are there any other artistic traditions that inspire your work?

Definitely miniature painting, especially the international Islamic miniature style popular from Persia to India. I want to take Jews out of the European narrative, and there is something about Mughal painting in particular that really suits this subject. Of course 19th century Orientalist painting is a big influence too. I kind of see myself as an Orientalist, because (if you’ve ever read Edward Said), the Orientalist approach was to use exotic cultures to reflect one’s feelings about one’s own heritage, and not to objectively document a different culture.

So I’m looking at Hasidim as this “primitive” eastern culture that nonetheless carries some essence of what makes me me. It’s a laughable idea, and I mean it as a little joke about alienation most of the time. Besides, there is the view that most people have (and never question) that Hasidim are the real, authentic Jews; that we all used to dress like that and then some of us decided to sneak out and put on “white people” clothes. The Hasid is the primitive Jew in the popular imagination, a view which is utterly baseless yet very stubborn.

What’s on the horizon for you? Do you think you will stick with Hasidim as subjects, or do you feel yourself moving in a different direction?

More Hasidim is where my heart is, but the MFA process is bound to push me in some unexpected direction. Whatever happens, I have unfinished business with this subject and will most definitely return to it (if I ever leave it, that is).

Jews of Today is on display at 7 Dunham gallery in South Williamsburg from July 20-31, with an opening reception July 20 from 7-10 p.m. The book is available online and at the exhibit.

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In 2007 we dubbed her the Anti-Feminist Feminist Jewish Latina. We stumbled upon performance artist/ Internet curator/ editor Maya Escobar again at the GA in New Orleans where her video installations were making a Marina Abramovich-style scene near Jewcy’s booth. She uses the web as a platform for engaging in critical community dialogues that concern processes by which identities are socially and culturally constructed. She performs multiple identities, sampling widely from online representations of existing cultural discourses. Her proud identifications as a Latina-Jewish artist, dyslexic blogger, fitness enthusiast, activist and educator are indexed by the blogs she keeps, the visual and textual links she posts, the books, articles, and blog posts she cites, the public comments she leaves, and the groups she joins. We were lucky enough to make friends and score some Shomer Negiah panties and have kept in touch since. Her recent collaboration with Puerto Rican installation and performance artist Andria Morales has culminated in two ongoing projects, Are You My Other? and AMerican MEdia Output.

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