Breaking the Pattern and Creating New Paths – Feminist Mizrahi Women Artists in Israel (original) (raw)

A Space of Their Own: Arab Women Artists in Israel: Identity of a ‘Double-Minority’

2018

This research paper focuses on the art of three women artists – Fatima Abu-Roomi, Samah Shihadi and Fatma Shanan. The research paper focuses on the work of three women artists who are ‘double-minority’—Fatima Abu-Roomi, Samah Shihadi, and Fatma Shanan. Their ‘doubleminority’ status comes from being Arab women, raised in patriarchal communities as Muslims (Abu-Roomi and Shihadi), or Druze (Shanan), who live and work among a Jewish majority in the Western-based environment of Israel. The objectives of this research are to point out the significance of their art as an innovative and unique voice within the Israeli art scene that reflect the conditions of young Arab women living in Israel today. Through analysis of their art, the research will aim to explore the artistic strategies, topics, and styles, as a means of negotiating their identity as a ‘double-minority’. A feminist reading of the artwork will be followed by another theoretical point of view from the psychoanalyst Donald W. W...

Re-Reading Women Artists and Feminist Discourse in 1980s Israeli Art

"Re-Reading Women Artists and Feminist Discourse in 1980s Israeli Art." Israel Studies, vol. 28 no. 1, 2023, p. 162-182., 2023

The article proposes a gender-based re-reading, re-appreciation, and re-contextualization of the endeavors and works of several Israeli women artists in the 1980s. Adopting a mixed method (visual, gender, and critical research) and based on archival data and current interviews, it sheds light on silenced aspects in the works of women artists but also expands on the way aesthetics and politics in the field of art are understood within the dominant symbolic order.

From First-Wave to Third-Wave Feminist Art in Israel: A Quantum Leap

Israel Studies, 2011

Feminist art is currently thriving in Israel after having come a long and curvy way. Although early twentieth century Zionism promoted gender equality in the spirit of first-wave feminism, the movement never gathered the momentum needed for it to develop into second-wave feminism. While its influence could be seen in the art of the 1970s, particularly in the United States, feminist ideology remained absent from the work of women artists in Israel. This state of affairs continued until the 1990s, when a turning point occurred. The article shows the influence of second and even thirdwave feminism on Israeli women's art. It also considers the reasons for lack of a distinct category of feminist art prior to the 1990s, as well as the conditions and features of its emergence, using the case of American feminist art for comparison. The article demonstrates that although Israeli women artists were initially slow to develop a second-wave feminist ideology, it took them less than a decade to make a "quantum leap" into the next theoretical and practical stage. Within a decade and a half, Israeli women artists caught up with their colleagues overseas and are now creating cutting-edge, relevant, and contemporary feminist art.

Israeli-Ness or Israeli-Less? How Israeli Women Artists from FSU Deal with the Place and Role of "Israeli-Ness" in the Era of Transnationalism

Arts 2019, 8(4), 159, 2019

The Israeli art field has been negotiating with the definition of Israeli-ness since its beginnings and more even today, as “transnationalism” has become not only a lived daily experience among migrants or an ideological approach toward identity but also a challenge to the Zionist-Hebrew identity that is imposed on “repatriated” Jews. Young artists who reached Israel from the Former Soviet Union (FSU) as children in the 1990s not only retained their mother tongue but also developed a hyphenated first-generation immigrant identity and a transnational state of mind that have found artistic expression in projects and exhibitions in recent years, such as Odessa–Tel Aviv (2017), Dreamland Never Found (2017), Pravda (2018), and others. Nicolas Bourriaud’s botanical metaphor of the radicant, which insinuates successive or even “simultaneous en-rooting”, seems to be close to the 1.5-generation experience. Following the transnational perspective and the intersectional approach (the “inter” being of ethnicity, gender, and class), the article examines, among others, photographic works of three women artists: Angelika Sher (born 1969 in Vilnius, Lithuania), Vera Vladimirsky (born 1984 in Kharkiv, Ukraine), and Sarah Kaminker (born 1987 in Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine). All three reached Israel in the 1990s, attended Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem, and currently live and work in Tel Aviv or (in Kaminker’s case) Haifa. The Zionist-oriented Israeli-ness of the Israeli art field is questioned in their works. Regardless of the different and peculiar themes and approaches that characterize each of these artists, their oeuvres touch on the senses of radicantity, strangeness, and displacement and show that, in the globalization discourse and routine transnational moving around, anonymous, generic, or hybrid likenesses become characteristics of what is called “home,” “national identity,” or “promised land.” Therefore, it seems that under the influence of this young generation, the local field of art is moving toward a re-framing of its Israeli national identity. View Full-Text Keywords: transnationality; radicantity; Israeli art; FSU 1.5-generation immigration; women artists; intersectional theory; contemporary photography

In Search of Transnational Jewish Art: Immigrant Women Artists from The Former Soviet Union in Contemporary Israel

Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, 2016

The article explores the subject of contemporary Jewish identity through the case of young immigrant women artists from the former Soviet Union in Israel, with particular emphasis on an analysis of the gendered aspects of their religious identity. Drawing on an interdisciplinary method, the research is based on in-depth interviews with artists, artwork analysis, and various theories from the social sciences and humanities. The article's main argument is that an analysis of the artistic practices of this and similar understudied social groups, particularly those practices undertaken in moments of conflict or times of deep social change, produces a more subtle understanding of the shifting modes of Jewish identity in the age of globalization and transnationalism, whose phenomenon of mass migration has led to the construction of new multi-hyphenated, hybrid identities.

Center-Periphery relations: Women's art in Israel during the 1970's, the case of Miriam Sharon

Consciousness, Literature and the Arts 8(3), 2007

There was a time, not so very long ago, when the term "feminism", no matter how or by whom it was defined, belonged to a monolithic category. The second wave of feminism in America, in the late 1960s, seemed blind to all categories other then "male" or "female". Theories of class and the effects of a rapidly growing global economy; the mutable and fluctuating borders that constantly redefine communities, languages, practices, and national, ethnic and gender identities at the beginning of the millennium -non of this figured in the earliest attempts to postulate a politics of "feminism". In this article I aim to re-examine a distinct art manifestation made in Israel -that was clearly influenced by the American second wave feminism -during the 1970s by artist Miriam Sharon, and understand it in light of contemporary discourse.

Jewish Identities in American Feminist Art

Jewish Identities in American Feminist Art, 2006

Lisa Bloom's book, poised at the crest of a wave, shines a nuanced light on an important aspect of the year of feminist art. That's what Leigh Ann Miller calls 2007 in "Gender on Ice," in Art in America, and with good reason. Major exhibitions of feminist art occurred on both coasts this year: the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles showed Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution and the Brooklyn Museum showed Global Feminisms. Feminism in art is current in this decade; in the 1990s artists were concerned with identity politics. In 1996 the Jewish Museum in New York showed the groundbreaking exhibition, Too Jewish? Challenging Traditional Identities. Following these cultural developments, Lisa Bloom's groundbreaking book addresses the overwhelming Jewish connection with feminist art from the 70s through the present and considers how Jewish identities are constructed within feminist art. Bloom examines the fascinating and important question about what she terms the imbrication (that is, layering and overlapping) of certain unacknowledged questions of Jewish identity that has overlain American feminism in the arts and she looks at what she calls "ghosts" of ethnicity. Is the Jewish identity of so many feminist artists, many more than are presented in this book, a coincidence or does Jewish ethnicity connect them? How do Jewish religious values and ethnic identity play a part in feminist art? Does their Jewish identity permeate every act of their visual art? Can a Jewish feminist artist create a Jewish feminist artwork and a mainstream non-Jewish non-feminist artwork or is every artwork made by a Jewish feminist also a Jewish feminist artwork? These questions should be seen in the context of the identity politics of the 1990s. Lisa Bloom comes to Jewish feminist art after the identity politics that overwhelmed the subject matter of artists in the 1990s. Many artists at that time explored issues surrounding their ethnic, racial and sexual identities African Americans, Latinos, Lesbian, and gay artists depicted their concerns with identity. It was "in the air" and Jewish artists followed that trend. Her perspective is from visual culture studies rather than art history and her locus is California more than other parts of the American cultural scene. The book starts with a chapter about Clement Greenberg and ends with an Arab American woman artist. Thus, the book concerns Jewish identity in a larger context than Jewish feminist artists. Only a selected number of artists are discussed. It would be worthwhile to consider Jewish feminist art with a more complete sample of the feminist women artists as well writers, critics, art collectives, curators, and gallery owners. All that would add immensely to our consideration of this important topic. To her enduring credit, Bloom takes on a very large topic but the discussion is superficial in many cases. The book is both fascinating and flawed, controversial and challenging.

Breaking the Ta boo: Ritual Impurity in Israeli and American Jewish Feminist Art

2023

The article examines works by two Orthodox artists, an American, Mierle Laderman Ukeles (b. 1939) and an Israeli, Hagit Molgan (b. 1972), both concerned with the Jewish laws and rituals of niddah (menstruation) and tevilah (immersion). The analysis of the similarities and differences between works from two major Jewish centers, Israel and the United States, provides insight into how critical responses in works of art point to complex cultural divides. Scholars and curators of Jewish art tend to examine Jewish-Israeli art as distinct from Jewish art created elsewhere. Due to this disconnect, the relationship between Jewish-Israeli art and its patrons around the world has received little attention before now. Consequently, the discussion of art created in different spaces and times contributes to a richer, more contextualized understanding of diasporic art.