| | My second year teaching the Cleveland Jewish Arts and Culture Lab came to a close last night - with a stunning, warm and vibrant show! This year's theme was "Remembering and Forgetting." It was amazing to watch the artists work emerge over the months of our meetings together. My remarks are below: MEMORY ARTISTS: As I prepared to teaching this year's Jewish Arts and Culture Fellows, I conjured up a Jewish Museum of Memory Art, home to three imaginary galleries |
The first gallery is a stark white room, inhabited by a man garbed in black, bent over a drafting table that is empty save a piece of parchment, an ink well and a quill pen. As he writes, the scribe’s mind is occupied only with the letters that have been passed down to him. He is disciplined. His writing is neat and precise with no flair of originality. He is a vessel through which the words of those who came before him are transmitted. His creation is beautiful in its regularity and rhythm. It is enlivened through his breath which passes over the parchment as he works. Each careful movement of his wrist and fingers imbue the work with human spirit. His is master of transmission.
The second gallery in my imaginary museum is a reproduction of the Dura-Europas synagogue. Among the oldest in the world, this synagogue was built in the third century in what is today Syria, and was uncovered by archeologists in the 1930. Historians know little about the artists who painted the walls of this space, and what motivated in their work. In my imagination, they created their vast and colorful scenes to capture and direct the attention of the worshippers who gathered here so many hundreds of years ago.
I am particularly interested the depiction of the binding of Isaac. This troubling story – as it appears in the Torah - has God ordering Abraham to sacrifice his beloved son. Abraham agrees and prepares Isaac for the slaughter. The Dura-Europas artist included each of the elements listed in the text; the father, the son, the knife, the altar, the angel who calls out to Abraham “Do not stretch your hand towards the lad,” and the ram who is offered up in Isaac’s stead.
When the artist (of my imaginary museum) completed the sketch of her painting, she showed it to her fellow artists. “Where is the mother?” one of the fellows asked. “You cannot leave her out,” another added, “she yearned for that child for years, and she birthed him in her old age, only to have the father take him away.” Prompted by the others, the artist was overcome with the urge to fill in a piece of the past with her own spirit. This artist knew full well that Sarah appears nowhere in the conversation between God and Abraham, or between Abraham and Isaac. No matter. The artist drew Sarah’s tent and placed her in it, hovering above the scene as though to say, “Consider me when you read your black and white text.” With this rendition, our artist inserts her creative spirit into our collective memory of the past.
In the third gallery are a few women and men, young and old, who are working to remember the details of their lives. Their space is filled with paper, canvas, paint, hardware, cloth, thread, dye, tiles and beads. These materials beckon the artists to give shape to that which is ephemeral and so deeply personal that it belongs to them alone: A father’s stories of his army service. A brother’s sweat on the basketball court. A mother’s baking. A son who has gone too soon. In this gallery, the Memory Artists reach for the materials that are scattered around them to sew, paint, cement, cut, rip, paste, and weave. And from this labor, their mercurial, shifting, ephemeral and sometimes unreliable memories take shape. They become solid products, born into the world for others to behold.
There is one other gallery in the Jewish Museum of Memory Art. This one is here and it is real. I am witness to it, as are you. Miraculous and mysterious, this gallery contains the imprint of all three imaginary ones, melded together. A faithfulness to tradition, with bold creativity. The deeply personal, with the collective memory of the Jewish People. Where the history of the kibbutz, and a grandfather’s hardware shop share the same space. Where a long past of Jewish suffering converges with personal family loss. Where photos of grandparents occupy the same mosaic as the enduring Jewish Tree of Life symbol. Where a literature professor, and a Yiddish poet, and the words of Deuteronomy dance on the same pages.
This is Jewish Memory Art.
The second gallery in my imaginary museum is a reproduction of the Dura-Europas synagogue. Among the oldest in the world, this synagogue was built in the third century in what is today Syria, and was uncovered by archeologists in the 1930. Historians know little about the artists who painted the walls of this space, and what motivated in their work. In my imagination, they created their vast and colorful scenes to capture and direct the attention of the worshippers who gathered here so many hundreds of years ago.
I am particularly interested the depiction of the binding of Isaac. This troubling story – as it appears in the Torah - has God ordering Abraham to sacrifice his beloved son. Abraham agrees and prepares Isaac for the slaughter. The Dura-Europas artist included each of the elements listed in the text; the father, the son, the knife, the altar, the angel who calls out to Abraham “Do not stretch your hand towards the lad,” and the ram who is offered up in Isaac’s stead.
When the artist (of my imaginary museum) completed the sketch of her painting, she showed it to her fellow artists. “Where is the mother?” one of the fellows asked. “You cannot leave her out,” another added, “she yearned for that child for years, and she birthed him in her old age, only to have the father take him away.” Prompted by the others, the artist was overcome with the urge to fill in a piece of the past with her own spirit. This artist knew full well that Sarah appears nowhere in the conversation between God and Abraham, or between Abraham and Isaac. No matter. The artist drew Sarah’s tent and placed her in it, hovering above the scene as though to say, “Consider me when you read your black and white text.” With this rendition, our artist inserts her creative spirit into our collective memory of the past.
In the third gallery are a few women and men, young and old, who are working to remember the details of their lives. Their space is filled with paper, canvas, paint, hardware, cloth, thread, dye, tiles and beads. These materials beckon the artists to give shape to that which is ephemeral and so deeply personal that it belongs to them alone: A father’s stories of his army service. A brother’s sweat on the basketball court. A mother’s baking. A son who has gone too soon. In this gallery, the Memory Artists reach for the materials that are scattered around them to sew, paint, cement, cut, rip, paste, and weave. And from this labor, their mercurial, shifting, ephemeral and sometimes unreliable memories take shape. They become solid products, born into the world for others to behold.
There is one other gallery in the Jewish Museum of Memory Art. This one is here and it is real. I am witness to it, as are you. Miraculous and mysterious, this gallery contains the imprint of all three imaginary ones, melded together. A faithfulness to tradition, with bold creativity. The deeply personal, with the collective memory of the Jewish People. Where the history of the kibbutz, and a grandfather’s hardware shop share the same space. Where a long past of Jewish suffering converges with personal family loss. Where photos of grandparents occupy the same mosaic as the enduring Jewish Tree of Life symbol. Where a literature professor, and a Yiddish poet, and the words of Deuteronomy dance on the same pages.
This is Jewish Memory Art.
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