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Painting

Content type
Collection
Collage of painted Stars of David

Finding Spirituality Through Art

Margaret Lockman

Religion and art are both about turning individual experiences into community ones.

Ruth Schloss

Through her socio-political artworks, Israeli painter Ruth Schloss (1922-2013) directed the viewer's attention to the human conditions of the downtrodden and marginalized in Israeli society from the 1940s through the early 2000s. She depicted figures and images people usually prefer to ignore, such as the poor and the unprivileged, the working class, newcomers, Mizrahi Jews, Palestinian refugees, the disastrous ruins of the wars in Israel, the Intifada in the occupied territories, women and children, newborns, and the elderly.

Collage of geometric artwork created by RVF fellow Talia Richmond's great-grandfather

Building Connections Though My Great-Grandfather’s Paintings

Talia Richmond

I’ve uncovered a thread, in the form of a chain of paintings by my great-grandfather that stretches across the United States and links me to my aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents, who live hundreds of miles away.

Topics: Painting, Family
Woman with puppets on each hand staging a puppet show

Women Shaping Jewish Life in Germany

Donna Swarthout
Doris H. Gray

Women are at the forefront of efforts to change the perception and reality of Jewish life in Germany. 

Gluck (b. Hannah Gluckstein)

A self-proclaimed individualist, Gluck painted outside abstract contemporary trends. Instead, Gluck naturalistically painted subjects reflecting her personal life and social circle, making her a unique character in the modern British art scene. Gluck was also proud of her queer, androgynous identity, which she infused into her artwork.

Installation of crocheted white bra and underwear with a prayer book, on a dark background

7 Questions For Artist Gavi Weitzman

Sarah Biskowitz

JWA talks to Gavi Weitzman, a multimedia artist based in Philadelphia whose work explores Judaism, the body, and identity.

Amalie Rothschild

Project
Weaving Women's Words

Jean Freedman interviewed Amalie Rothschild on August 19, 2001, in Baltimore, Maryland, as part of the Weaving Women's Words Oral History Project. Rothschild details her life journey, from growing up in Baltimore suburbs, studying art, getting married, raising her children, and pursuing a successful career as an abstract artist and sculptor, while navigating her Jewish identity and the evolving role of women.

Frances Berman Sulsky

Project
Weaving Women's Words

Frances Berman Sulsky was interviewed by Elaine Eff on April 30, 2001, in Baltimore, Maryland for the Weaving Women's Words Oral History Project. Sulsky discusses her upbringing, millinery career, family moves, the Jewish neighborhood, business growth, and reflections on being a businesswoman and life in Baltimore.

Madron Gallery in Chicago launches "Growing Up Jewish—Art and Storytelling," by Jacqueline Kott-Wolle

October 23, 2019

Jacqueline Kott-Wolle first displayed her series Growing Up Jewish—Art and Storytelling in 2019 in Chicago. This series celebrates the intergenerational experience of Kott-Wolle's family after relocating to North America as a result of the Holocaust. Her lively paintings illuminate the inner workings of her family’s contemporary Jewish experience and celebrate her community.  

Roz Chast

One of New York’s most distinct Jewish cultural voices, Roz Chast is most famous for her New Yorker cartoons over the past four decades. Her works range from whimsical, irreverent, and quirky to poignant and heartbreaking, and she is widely considered one of the most comically ingenious and satirically edgy visual interpreters of everyday life.

Painting by Siona Benjamin featuring a woman as the body of a menorah, with seven branches coming out as arms

From the Archive: 'Tikkun Ha-Olam, Finding Home Series #46' by Siona Benjamin

Deborah Dash Moore
Mimi Jessica Brown Wooten

The Posen Library shares a painting by Bene Israel Jewish artist Siona Benjamin. 

Philanthropist and artist Rose Henriques is born

August 17, 1889

Rose (Loewe) Henriques spent her adult life in London's East End, providing social welfare offerings to the largely Jewish population and documenting the area’s experience of the tumultuous early twentieth century in her acclaimed paintings.

Cartoon of woman in front of her painting, look at camera

A New Film About Charlotte Salomon Strips Her Soul from Her Art

Amelia Merrill

What could have been an innovative look at a forgotten artist instead becomes another cookie-cutter biopic.

Topics: Painting, Holocaust, Film
Chagall's Hommage à Apollinaire - woman and man's body merged together

This Chagall Piece Reflects My Nonbinary Gender

Anne Vetter

This Chagall piece invites me to see myself as split and whole in the same moment.

Photo of Riva Lehrer on left and cover of her book Golem Girl on right

Interview with Riva Lehrer, Artist and Author of "Golem Girl"

Jen Richler

JWA talks to artist Riva Lehrer about her recent memoir, Golem Girl, and the way her disabled, queer, and Jewish identities intersect.

Zoya Cherkassky

Zoya Cherkassky (b. 1976 in Kyiv, Ukraine) is a prominent Israeli artist. She works in a range of media and styles, synthesizing traditional painting techniques with vernacular tools and moving freely between allusions to the European canon and contemporary art. Her work is marked by humor, irony, and satire and at times has been controversial.

Retrospective Exhibit of work by Sonia Delaunay opens in Buffalo

February 2, 1980

On this day, the largest survey to date of Ukraine-born French artist Sonia Delaunay’s (1885-1979) work opened at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York.

Aline Kominsky-Crumb

Aline Kominsky-Crumb was a pioneer of the autobiographical comics genre and a leading figure in the feminist underground comics movement. Her career as a cartoonist began in 1972, when she joined the Wimmen’s Comix collective in San Francisco and published her first comic Goldie. A Neurotic Women. She went on to author, publish and co-edit several books and magazines, including the comics anthology Love That Bunch (1990), and the graphic Memoir Need More Love (2007).

Sionah Tagger

Sionah Tagger was one of the earliest modern Israeli women artists to have been born in Erez Israel. She played an important part in the development of modern painting there in the 1920s and 1930s and was among the first members of Israel’s Association of Painters and Sculptors and a regular participant in its exhibitions.

Judy Cassab

Vienna-born, Budapest-trained painter Judy Cassab, a survivor of the Holocaust, arrived in Australia in 1951. She became one of the country’s best-known and best-loved artists, primarily for her portraits but also for her depictions of Australia’s bright interior.

EL Konigsburg

Elaine Lobl Konigsburg is best remembered from her many beloved children’s novels, including The Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William McKinley and Me, Elizbeth, and The View from Saturday. Her novels and her characters reflect the angst of growing up in a middle-class world and finding your way, no matter where you come from.

Shula Keshet

Shula Keshet is an Israeli Mizrahi feminist activist, an artist, and a curator. Her activism strives for justice for underprivileged women and men in Israel; as a Mizrahi feminist artist and curator, she has created several exhibitions.

Audrey Flack

The only female member of the founding group of photorealists, New York-born painter and sculptor Audrey Flack is especially recognized for the feminine content in her art. Her feminist sensibilities manifest in both her pioneering paintings, which often consider stereotypes of womanhood, and her sculptures, frequently depicting goddesses and other strong female figures. Flack’s work appears in prominent collections around the world.

Mirta Kupferminc

Mirta Kupferminc (b.1955) is an internationally recognized contemporary Argentine Jewish artist. For the past four decades, she has explored memory, culture, history, and language, in a variety of art media.

Sarah Rodrigues Brandon

Sarah Rodrigues Brandon (1798-1828) was born poor, enslaved, and Christian on the island of Barbados. By the time of her death thirty years later she was one of the wealthiest Jews in New York and her family were leaders in Congregation Shearith Israel. This entry explains Sarah’s life journey and highlights how her story relates to that of other women of mixed African and Jewish ancestry in early America.

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