Visual artist Annette Hirsh has been doing Jewish art for years, including making metal crowns for Torah scrolls.
Watercolor painter Clarice Zucker, on the other hand, decided only recently to begin doing art on Jewish themes.
Poet Peter Goldberg had been undergoing “a really dry period” of not writing.
And choreographer and teacher Kate Mann simply wanted to associate with creative people and grow as a Jewish educator.
All four found something meaningful to them as artists and Jews in the Milwaukee Jewish Artists’ Laboratory 2015 — and were among the 22 artists in different media who participated this year.
This four-year-old program is directed in Milwaukee by Jody Hirsh, director of Judaic education at the Harry & Rose Samson Family Jewish Community Center and a playwright and musician.
In an interview with The Chronicle, Jody Hirsh (no relation to Annette Hirsh) explained that the Artists’ Lab seeks to promote Jewish learning, build community and inspire creativity among the artists — and to share the results with the larger Jewish community.
“We really created this very powerful Jewish community of artists,” he said. “People feel that the community of artists doesn’t understand what it means to be Jewish and an artist, and the community of Jews doesn’t understand what it means to be an artist. So this is a very powerful thing for almost everybody.”
The four interviewed participants found the lab enriching in different ways.
“I like the idea of meeting artists of various ages working in various mediums,” said Annette Hirsh.
“It’s been inspirational to work with other artists,” said Zucker. “It’s given me the chance to develop in different directions [and] it’s been a wonderful group to work with.”
“It led to a bursting of the clouds,” said Goldberg. “It really came flowing as a consequence of the subject matter we were studying.”
“It was a catalyst for giving me a Jewish context within which to create a focus for a dance,” said Mann. “It was a safe place to grow in my identity as a Jewish educator.”
The lab is supported by a grant from the Covenant Foundation, which from its New York City base strives to honor Jewish educators, support “creative approaches to programming,” and thereby “to strengthen educational endeavors that perpetuate the identity, continuity and heritage of the Jewish people.”
Moreover, the lab during its second and third years expanded beyond Milwaukee to include similar groups in Madison and Minneapolis. This year the Covenant Foundation gave the program a second grant, $115,000 for one year, to expand it further to Kansas City, Chicago and one city yet unchosen, Jody Hirsh said.
As Hirsh explained, each of the four labs to date has lasted an academic year and has been built around a common theme chosen by the artists.
The participants then have two meetings a month of two hours each. These sessions are usually divided into two parts.
The first is devoted to “text study,” usually led by Jody Hirsh. He said one of the differences between his Artists’ Lab and similar efforts created earlier is that to him a “text” need not just be a prose sample from Jewish religious literature. It could also be “a contemporary poem, a video clip, a piece of music, a photograph,” he said.
This year’s theme was water. That may not seem like a particularly Jewish topic; yet as Hirsh pointed out, the Torah begins by talking about “the spirit of God hovering over the face of the waters” (Genesis 1:2), suggesting that water existed before God created anything else.
There are numerous prayers for rain in the Psalms and traditional prayer book. And in keeping with his broad definition of “text,” Hirsh brought in an Israeli geologist to speak of flash flooding in the Negev Desert.
He also had Mann teach the group Israeli folk dances to songs about water, like “Mayim, Mayim,” Emanuel Pugashov Amiran’s setting of Isaiah 12:3, “Joyfully shall you draw water from the fountains of triumph.”
The second part of each session this year was usually led by Marc Tasman, an intermedia artist teaching at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, though Hirsh said sometimes he and Tasman switched roles. Hirsh said the group explored artistic issues like “Whom do you create for, yourself or an audience?” and “What does it mean to be Jewish and an artist?”
The climax of the year is an exhibition of works created by group members. This opened this year at the JCC with a reception on June 4, and will last through August, Hirsh said.
Hirsh said that the artists began creating at many different stages in the year. “Some began before we even started the sessions. Others were totally at the last minute; they didn’t know what they were going to do.”
Annette Hirsh contributed a work she had made several years previously, a copper and brass image of the book of Jonah.
Zucker, on the other hand, created her mixed media triptych “And God Hurled a Great Wind into the Sea” during this year. “As soon as we have a theme, your mind starts going and you think about it for a couple of months before you dive in,” Zucker said. “That’s part of the fun, mulling it over in your mind.”
Most of the time, the artists create something that can be shown at the exhibition. Jody Hirsh wrote seven “micro dramas” collectively titled “Flash Floods” to be performed on Thursday, July 23, 7:30 p.m., at the North Shore Boulangerie, 4401 N. Oakland Ave.; but he created a poster for the performance that is displayed in the JCC.
Mann’s work, however, can’t be displayed. She created “Water Dances,” which she taught to seniors at Chai Point Senior Living on June 17.
“My purpose was to show others the beauty I see in elders,” Mann said. “What I’ve done is chosen Jewish songs with water images and choreographed flowing movement to them for elders to do.”
Sometimes creative collaborations have resulted. Goldberg wrote several poems and he worked with Berel Lutsky, associate professor of art at UW-Manitowoc, to create displayable art with the poems that suggests a Talmud page, Goldberg said.
Other coming events associated with this year’s Artists’ Lab are:
“On the Face of the Waters,” a family art project directed by lab participants Leah Bensman McHenry and Amit Yaniv-Zehavi, Israel emissary to Milwaukee, on Sunday, July 12, 2 p.m., at the Hy & Richard Smith JCC Waterpark, 11015 N. Market St., Mequon.
“My Mouth Full of Words Like the Sea,” on Thursday, July 16, 7 p.m., at the JCC, an evening of reading and discussion with writers in the Artists’ Lab.
The other participating artists not mentioned earlier were: Bonita Bruch, Barbara Chudnow, Nina Edelman, Richard Edelman, Audrienne Eder, Helene Fischman, Judith Harway, Lizzie Bassuk Katz, Phillip Katz, Barbara Kohl-Spiro, Deborah Wolf Lurie, Stephen Pevnick and Maida Silverman.
For more information about the Artists’ Lab, contact Jody Hirsh, JHirsh@JCCMilwaukee.org or 414-967-8199.
Loading ...