Piri Halasz on my art in From the Mayor’s Doorstep
May 30th, 2009 by Menachem Wecker
Piri Halasz, who writes the fantastic site From the Mayor’s Doorstep, writes about my work in her June 2009 column. Piri is the author most recently of A Memoir of Creativity: Abstract Painting, Politics & the Media, 1956-2008, and in addition to writing on the arts for Time, she has published more than 200 articles and reviews in 11 different publications, which range Smithsonian magazine to NYArts (in which I have also published a handful of reviews) and the Virginia Quarterly Review. Her full bio is available here.
Here is the relevant passage about the show I was in:
In the Stanton Street Synagogue, one block south of Houston, I attended the opening of an exhibit of the Jewish Art Salon entitled “Tzelem: Likeness and Presence in Jewish Art.” The Jewish Art Salon is a group of artists who meet once a month to discuss their work, life, the Jewish themes inherent in their work, and the variety of sources that they draw upon to create it. In the book of Genesis, God creates man using the word “Tzelem,” meaning “likeness,” but (explained the curators for this show) “the Hebrew word does not imply a visual correspondence. Rather it denotes intelligence and is bound up with concepts of morality, language, and a unique spiritual paradigm.” Even so, nearly all the work in this exhibition of 29 artists was representational, not abstract. A few of the 29 were professional artists, among them Archie Rand, Jill Nathanson, Deborah Rosenthal and Tobi Kahn, but on the whole, the emphasis of this exhibition was iconographic, as opposed to stylistic – few if indeed any esthetic radicals here. I was invited to the opening by Menachem Wecker, who is better known as a critic and writer than he is as an artist (this was also true of several other participants in the show). Without wishing to appear overly influenced by his hospitality, I have to say that I thought his three drawings were almost, maybe even the best pieces in the show–nothing spectacular about them, just plain honest workmanship (their subject: three personifications of that enigmatic figure, the Wandering Jew, as rendered in three different artistic styles).
To read the rest of Piri’s June article, click here.