The Lilith Blog

August 11, 2020 by admin

Black Jewish Women Artists You Should Know…Jessica Valoris

Art–whether it be dancing, painting, drawing, film–creates a space for self-examination, helping us to envision possible futures, and better versions of ourselves. And the Jewish month of Elul is traditionally an opportunity for introspection before the High Holidays of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.

Recognizing the power of art to be transformative, Lilith is highlighting Black Jewish women artists in this time leading up to and through Elul. On Lilith’s platforms you’ll have a chance to experience, share, buy and celebrate their work.

You can also participate by letting us know (at info@Lilith.org) Black Jewish women creators we should include!

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Jessica Valoris is a multidisciplinary installation artist who weaves together sound, collage, painting, sculpture, and facilitated ritual to build installations and experiences that have been described as sacred, intentional, and activated. She’s inspired by Afrofuturism, metaphysics, and historical memory.

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November 4, 2019 by admin

Linda Olivetti Kohen’s Unsentimental Art

Linda Olivetti Kohen, photographed by Joan Roth in NY

“I always paint autobiographical things, because it is what I know best. I want to paint things not for what they are, but for the emotions they provoke in me. That mysterious sensation, for example, caused by a room, a corner, where at one time I felt something.”

Linda Olivetti Kohen, 94, made these remarks for a 2012 exhibition of her paintings; when she visited New York recently before returning home to prepare for a major solo exhibition in Montevideo to open in December, she showed Lilith the catalogue of that earlier show of her dazzling, jewel-toned work. Kohen has lived in South America since fleeing Italy at 15 with her family, in 1939. Despite transitions of place and culture, she has continued to paint almost every day throughout her life, she told Lilith in a wide-ranging conversation. Many of Kohen’s paintings have an air of emptiness: an unoccupied chair or bed, a set table without diners, a series of corridors, a recurrence of suitcases. And several show parts of her body as she herself sees them, like the sequence with her feet resting on the floor as she sits on a bed. The work is mysterious and very beautiful, conveying loss but no lugubriousness or sentimentality.

In person, Kohen is charming, moving easily between English and, when speaking with her daughter, Spanish, talking about her early life in Milan, before Mussolini enacted his racial laws in 1938. “What was it like? Paradise. When we left Italy I didn’t have the right documents to go to university. And there was a war going on, so I just kept painting.”

“El gran biombo (The large screen),” 2005.

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