JAS OPEN STUDIOS ZOOM PROGRAMS CONTINUE!
Monday, April 12, 12 PM New York, 11 AM Chicago, 9 AM PT, 7 PM Jerusalem (PLEASE NOTE: NOT OUR USUAL DAY)
Jewish Art Salon invites you to the next live session of our successful online series, OPEN STUDIOS, Creativity in an Uncertain Time.
Curated by Judith Joseph and Dorit Jordan Dotan, in this acclaimed online series we will be joined by artists Shoshannah Brombacher, Berit Engen and Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern as they offer insight into their creative processes and share the impact of the current social order on the psychological and spiritual content of their work.
Please join Jewish Art Salon as these artists present their recent work and discuss how they have addressed the notion of Creativity in an Uncertain Time. This series will air live on Zoom, Monday, April 12, 2021 at 12PM EST.
In addition to the curators, this program is produced with the support of Jewish Art Salon’s Program Advisor Yona Verwer and team members Cheselyn Amato and Chana Wiesenthal-Elias.
Zoom info will be sent to our email list on the day of the event.
Register for the link here.
About the artists
Shoshannah Brombacher
Shoshannah Brombacher was born inAmsterdam, Holland in 1959 and holds a PhD in Jewish Studies. She has taught, researched, and studied in Leyden, Amsterdam, Berlin, and Jerusalem. She is an author, illustrator, visual artist , and maggidah (storyteller/spiritual guide). Her main interest is Chassidism, but includes the Golem of Prague, the Breslover Tikkun, Talmudic, Midrashic and Biblical stories, Biblical women, the weekly Torah-portion, the Twelve Tribes, Goethe’s Faust, poetry (Yiddish, Sephardic, several European languages), the Haggadah, the Hebrew Aleph-Beth, Spinoza, classical composers, cities, The Dybbuk, and politically inspired poetry/events (Nazim Hikmet Ran, Occupy-Wallstreet). Brombacher creates custom art (ketubot, verses of a name, tikkunim, home-blessings Psalms, bar/bat mitzvah,in which calligraphy, text, letters and colors play an important role. She is a member of several art organizations, vice-president of the American Guild of Judaic Art, and was internationally awarded for her work, which can be found in all five continents.
Berit Engen
Berit Engen began weaving as a child in Norway and now practices this ancient craft in the centuries-old tradition of expounding on Jewish texts. Her ongoing project, “WEFT and DRASH – Weaving a Thousand Jewish Tapestries,” begun in 2007, consists to date of about 600 pieces. She compares her small-scale, linen-yarn tapestries to Japanese Haiku: formally constrained by a miniature size, imagistic and focused, yet allusive. Her work has been shown in solo and group shows, including exhibitions at the Spertus Institute in Chicago (2012-2013) and the Janice Charach Gallery of the JCC of Metropolitan Detroit (2018.) Her work is part of the permanent collection of the Chicago History Museum and has been featured in Lilith magazine. A ten-piece commission on the Sinai story is permanently installed at the entrance to the sanctuary of Temple Har Zion in River Forest, IL (2020). Engen is coeditor of Out of the Narrows: The Artists’ Haggadah (2021).
Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern
Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern is the Crown Family Professor at History Department, Northwestern University, where he teaches early modern and modern Jewish history and culture with a focus on East Europe. He earned a PhD From Moscow University in Comparative Literature and a PhD from Brandeis University in Modern Jewish History. His long but by no means straight itinerary brought him from Ukraine to the United States, and before he discovered his Jewish roots, he practiced Greek Orthodoxy, Zen-Buddhism, Anglo-Catholicism, and taught Spanish and Latin American Literature from Cervantes to García Márquez.
He extensively uses his experience as a scholar in his art to challenge what we think we know, understand, and believe. His artistic influences are Russian avant-garde, Ukrainian folk art, and Polish political poster art. He has had solo exhibitions of his art at the Spertus Institute, Chicago, the Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art, Chicago, The Ukrainian Museum, New York and Voznitsky Art Gallery, Lviv, Ukraine.
