Asylum Arts’ Bay Area Jewish Artist Retreat

I’ve just returned from the Asylum Arts’ Bay Area Jewish Artist Retreat. The mission of Brooklyn-based Asylum Arts is to support “contemporary Jewish culture on an international scale, bringing greater exposure to artists and cultural initiatives and providing opportunities for new projects and collaborations.”

I was delighted to decamp to the Mill Valley woods for a long weekend. As part of the retreat, I co-led a “sense of place” walk just upslope from one of only two streams in the Bay Area identified as essential to the recovery of coho salmon in California.

The time outdoors was a treat, but the most vital and exciting part of the retreat was the assembled cohort, 27 other artists – poets, filmmakers, playwrights, social practice peeps, musicians, choreographers, visual artists, and more – that I got to know over the course of four intense days. Surely, we only scratched the surface, but it often felt intimate; I cried (more than once). On the retreat’s last night, dirty blonde wig donned, I shook my ass on the dance floor. Throwing my head side to side while singing along with Robyn’s “Dancing On My Own,” I realized I was partying with people I trust and respect – people who were total strangers just days before.

I’m incredibly impressed with the vision and execution of the Asylum team. I went in with an open mind, but quite skeptical; now I feel only gratitude. What a remarkable and remarkably unexpected experience. I need time to process it, but I look forward to seeing what exciting collaborations and conversations come out of what we started under the redwoods.

The Parsha Project

As part of a communications and design job I held from 2016-2018, I created illustrations inspired by the weekly Torah portion, or parsha. Each Shabbat (the Jewish Sabbath), the artwork appeared on the cover of Congregation Beth Sholom’s service pamphlet, along with an expository note about the image and its inspiration. In all, I created over 112 illustrations, beginning with Parashat Beshalach (13 Shevat 5776 / January 23, 2016) and concluding with Parashat Vayikra (1 Nisan 5778 / March 17, 2018).

My artwork and writing generally wrestle with contemporary constructions of nature and the human relationship to non-human animal species. That’s my wheelhouse. My projects rarely draw on my Jewish identity, practice, or knowledge base in obvious ways. It was a privilege, therefore, to spend two years closely reading and visually interpreting Torah, a text that’s familiar to so many, but earnestly read by too few. Because I created each parsha illustration with its destination - a pamphlet cover – in mind, I felt the illustrations should *not* be displayed on their own; they are meant to appear framed by text. This preference gave rise to the poster format, which best reflects the project’s constituent parts: interpretation, illustration, and design.

Here, four of the posters that were selected by the Jewish Community Library (San Francisco) to be included in “The Parsha Project,” on view now through November 14. Maybe I’ll see you at the opening reception on Thursday, September 26, 6:30pm.

Details about the exhibition can be found here.