ARTIST LEOLA BERMANZOHN PAINTS STREET ART STYLE MURAL

Anne Scher/Alex Wittenberg
The Jewish Museum
212.423.3271
pressoffice@thejm.org

Press Release: October 23, 2008

ARTIST LEOLA BERMANZOHN PAINTS STREET ART STYLE MURAL AT THE JEWISH MUSEUM OCTOBER 30 TO DECEMBER 4

New York, NY - Leola Bermanzohn, a Brooklyn-based muralist, will produce a temporary, site-specific mural in response to the exhibition, The Dead Sea Scrolls: Mysteries of the Ancient World, at The Jewish Museum. The mural, Otiyot (Letters), will re-imagine the script of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Bermanzohn creates a new style of Hebrew lettering informed by Jewish mysticism, traditional calligraphy, and urban graffiti. While the art of the letter has been a staple of Jewish visual culture for thousands of years, Otiyot will imbue letters of the Hebrew alphabet with the social consciousness of a mural and the individualist expression of street art.

The public will be able to interact with Bermanzohn over a six-week period as she creates the mural in the Museum’s basement lobby on Thursday nights from 4 pm to 8 pm between October 30 and December 4 (excluding Thanksgiving, November 27). The completed work remains on view through January 4, 2009.

Otiyot is part of The Jewish Museum’s ongoing commissions that encourage artists to experiment with new expressions of Jewish identity in the 21st century, emphasizing new media, site-specificity, and social interaction. Bermanzohn, like others in the series, brings new questions to ancient traditions. The project also follows the path of Robert Rauschenberg, who created sculptures in 1974 partly in reaction to the aura of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

In Otiyot, the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet will be painted in order, from right to left, across three rows. Within this linear system, Bermanzohn will delve into the spiritual and sacred significance of the letters themselves. In the artist’s view, Hebrew letters are “free agents,” asserting their unique qualities through form, sound, color, and metaphor. The color scheme will draw attention to the seven special letters that have their own attached tag (Hebrew for decorative notation). Shapes and angles will be compared through juxtaposition of some letters. Highlights and shadows will strengthen the composition, defining each letter space while remaining mindful of the dependence on other letters for the conveyance of meaning.

Bermanzohn says of her inspiration: “I have come across several stories about the letters having their own matter independent of writings. According to legend, the actual tablets of the Ten Commandments were engraved right through the stone, so each letter created a hole in its own shape. Samek and final Mem, the two letters that are fully enclosed, stayed in the tablets ‘presumably by miracle.’ Additionally, when Moses shattered the first of the tablets, it is said that the letters then rose up to the sky and returned to “ ‘the One who had written them.’”

The project was organized by Henry J. Leir Assistant Curator Daniel Belasco.

Leola Bermanzohn is a muralist and art teacher in New York City. She was a principal artist on When Women Pursue Justice, a collaborative women’s history mural in Brooklyn, NY, completed in 2005. Her solo mural Women Warriors (2001) will be featured in the forthcoming book On the Wall: Four Decades of Community Murals in New York City (University Press of Mississippi, 2009). She has participated in several other mural projects in New York and San Francisco. Her painting was included in the group exhibition “Brooklyn Footprints, Portrait of a Brooklyn Neighborhood,” Brooklyn Public Library, 2007. Bermanzohn received a Studio Space Grant from Chashama Visual Arts Program and earned a BA in Studio Art from Hunter College

About The Jewish Museum

The Jewish Museum was established on January 20, 1904 when Judge Mayer Sulzberger donated 26 ceremonial art objects to The Jewish Theological Seminary of America as the core of a museum collection. Today, The Jewish Museum maintains an important collection of 26,000 objects – paintings, sculpture, works on paper, photographs, archaeological artifacts, ceremonial objects, and broadcast media. Widely admired for its exhibitions and educational programs that inspire people of all backgrounds, The Jewish Museum is the preeminent United States institution exploring the intersection of 4,000 years of art and Jewish culture.

General Information

Museum hours are Saturday through Wednesday, 11am to 5:45pm; and Thursday, 11am to 8pm. Museum admission is $12.00 for adults, $10.00 for senior citizens, $7.50 for students, free for children under 12 and Jewish Museum members. Admission is free on Saturdays. For general information on The Jewish Museum, the public may visit the Museum’s Web site at http://www.thejewishmuseum.org or call 212.423.3200. The Jewish Museum is located at 1109 Fifth Avenue at 92nd Street, Manhattan.

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ARTIST LEOLA BERMANZOHN PAINTS STREET ART STYLE MURAL

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