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Art

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Dora Gad

Dora Gad (1912-2003) was a prominent Israeli architect and interior designer. In the early decades of Israel's statehood, Gad played a key role in designing projects for the newly established national institutions in Israel. In 1966, she received the Israel Prize in architecture, the first woman to have ever received this prize.

Mary Frank

Mary Frank was a sculptor and painter inspired by dance, photography, and the moving body. Born in London, Frank immigrated to the United States in the 1940s and danced with Martha Graham and studied art at the American Art School in New York. Frank imparts a sense of the timelessness and her work, and her sculptures have been described as sensual, sublime, poetic and profoundly moving, placing her among the foremost figurative artists of our time. 

Ida Dehmel

Living a privileged existence in the wealthiest circles of German cultural society, Ida Dehmel became involved in circles of patronage of modern art that raised awareness for feminist issues, including women’s suffrage and equality for women’s artists’ associations. In 1916 she co-founded the Women’s Society for the Advancement of German Art.

Etta Cone

Art collector Etta Cone and her sister Claribel amassed one of the largest private art collections in the world during the early twentieth century. The sisters were major supporters of artists such as Matisse and Picasso, and their large collection of modern art was donated to the Baltimore Museum of Art.

Claribel Cone

Claribel Cone was well known in her time for being a dignified and highly independent woman with two passions: medical research and collecting art and artifacts. She is immortalized in drawings by French modernists Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse and in Gertrude Stein’s essay “Two Women.”

Elisheva Cohen

Elisheva Cohen was a successful curator, known for her work with the Israel Museum. She was a thorough, modest, and knowledgeable worker and person.

Anita Brookner

Anita Brookner was a British Jewish novelist and accomplished art historian known for her elegaic, gloomy novels depicting the bleak and disappointed lives of women. Receiving the Booker Prize in 1984 for Hotel du Lac, Brookner achieved international fame and recognition as one of the most accomplished writers of English fiction in the later twentieth century.

Marianne Breslauer

Marianne Breslauer was known for her style of quiet, poetic street scenes of Paris and Berlin and her photographs of Palestine in 1931. Breslauer studied at the Lette-Verein, the first school for women photographers, and was awarded the Hann Höch Prize in Berlin in 1999.

Susan Braun

Susan Braun preserved what were thought to be inherently fleeting experiences when, in 1956, she founded Dance Films Association to support, promote, and archive films of dance performances. Her efforts helped establish a community of dancers and filmmakers and formed a new genre of film.

Florence Meyer Blumenthal

Florence Meyer Blumenthal, an extraordinary philanthropist and arts patron, organized her own arts foundation in Paris, and donated millions of dollars to established institutions and public charities in America and France. Blumenthal’s foundation funded hundreds of promising artists and allowed them to focus on pursuing their craft.

Aline Bernstein

Aline Bernstein was one of the first theatrical designers in New York to make sets and costumes entirely from scratch and craft moving sets. She designed sets for the Theatre Guild and various independent producers, winning numerous awards for her work, including a Tony for costume design for Regina in 1949. She later founded the Costume Museum and began writing fiction.

Artists: Yishuv and Israel: 1920-1970

 While women are often excluded from the historical narrative of Israeli art-making, women artists made significant contributions to the canon of Israeli art throughout the twentieth century. Depicting landscapes, creating ceramics, and painting beautiful portraits, many female artists made significant contributions to the development of the Bezalel Art school and Israeli modern art. In 1952, the artistic Group of Ten was founded, to use a modern language in order to express the Israeli experience and landscape. 

Artists: Russia and the Soviet Union

Jewish women participated in the artistic life of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union for over a hundred years. Jewish women artists worked in all styles, from the routine academic to the extreme avant-garde. There were also well-known art patrons, gallery owners, art historians, and art critics.

Artists: Israeli, 1970 to 2000

The inclusion of feminism in Israeli art was seen as irrelevant in the 1970s, when Israel was seen as a state of gender equality. But in the following decades, amid vast changes in Israeli society, women worked hard to make themselves seen and have their stories told in the wider world of Israeli art.

Artists: Contemporary Anglo

In Britain, both feminism and feminist art took considerably longer to emerge and make their mark than in the United States, but when they did, many Jewish women artists created profound artistic work. British Jewish women artists generally hold both Jewishness and gender as central to their artistic output. Their art reveals the diverse ways in which women perceive their Jewishness in contemporary Britain.

"Second Generation" Women Artists in Israel

Israeli women artists, second generation descendants of Holocaust survivors, have expressed in their art the grim atmosphere of absence, emptiness, and loss they absorbed. Their individual responses to the Holocaust differ in intensity and power.

Artists in Britain: 1700-1940

Lilian Holt, Clara Klinghoffer, Gluck, Orovida Pissarro, Flora Lion, Lily Delissa Joseph, and perhaps most famously, Rebecca Solomon were just a few of the trailblazing Jewish female artists in England who overcame many obstacles, such as obtaining art lessons and entering a male dominated field, to work professionally and impact England’s art scene.

Art in the United States

American Jewish women have made major contributions to the art world as artists, photographers, gallery owners, museum curators, art critics, art historians, and collectors. The number of American Jewish women artists rose in the 1930s, and their activities expanded from painting into sculpture. This growth of Jewish women artists continued into the 21st century.

Art During the Holocaust

During the Holocaust, a number of women were able to create art while in concentration camps. Their works bear witness to their desire to escape the world in which they found themselves, while also revealing how they maintained their humanity and sensitivity despite the appalling conditions in which they lived.

Eleanor Antin

A seminal figure in the history of performance art, Eleanor Antin is one of the most prolific artists of the last three decades, moving freely in many forms of media, including live and installation art, independent film, photography, video, drawing, painting, and writing. In her work, Antin has explored audience expectations and assumptions about race, gender, and societal roles.

Ziva Amishai-Maisels

Ziva Amishai-Maisels is an Israeli/American art historian whose research on modern Jewish and non-Jewish art and on the impact of the Holocaust on art are an outstanding contribution to the study of art.

Who Does She Think She Is?

Jordan Namerow

This past weekend I saw a documentary film called Who Does She Think She Is?. The film profiles five female artists who are also mothers, as well as several commentators including Tiffany Shlain, creator of The Tribe, and Courtney Martin author of Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters and contributor to Feministing.com.

Topics: Art, Motherhood, Film

Since we’re talking about comic books…

Lily Rabinoff-Goldman

Those of you whose lives don't involve a weekly update on what new comics have come out this Wednesday might not be familiar with Y The Last Man, a 60-issue comic book (10 volume graphic novel), whose much anticipated final issue just came out last month.  The premise of Y The Last Man is that a mystery plague instantaneously wipes out every man and male mammal on planet Earth except for Yorick Brown, a 22 year old magician/slacker, and his capuchin monkey, Ampersand.  

Topics: Art, Fiction

Happy Earth Day! … with a Jewish, liberationist twist

Jordan Namerow

Art, liberation, ritual, the environment. For Jewish eco-feminist artist, Helene Aylon, these are the unifying elements of her life's work. In celebration of Earth Day, I've been re-exploring some of her ground-breaking work and realizing that we need more of it!

Topics: Feminism, Art

From Tekhines to Tap Dance

Jordan Namerow

Ever seen women with headscarves doing Vaudeville? Last week's Forward featured an article about Atara, an association of Torah observant artists whose new mission is to bring Orthodox female artists and performers together to nurture their creative expression -- be it through theatre, music, art, spoken word, etc. -- within a halachic framework. 

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