Art in the United States
American Jewish women have made major contributions to the art world as artists, photographers, gallery owners, museum curators, art critics, art historians, and collectors at least since the beginning of the twentieth century. In general, two major influences caused American Jewish women artists to reaffirm their Judaism. The first was the Holocaust, the second relates to general cultural and social trends related to identity within American society. Many early female Jewish artists were involved with The New York Society of Women Artists, a professional, avant-garde, and radically feminist group, founded in 1925. The number of American Jewish women artists rose in the 1930s, and their activities expanded from painting into sculpture. This growth of Jewish women artists continued into the 21st century.
American Jewish women have made major contributions to the art world as artists, photographers, gallery owners, museum curators, art critics, art historians, and collectors at least since the beginning of the twentieth century. Tracing the development of this group in previous centuries is difficult because biographical documentation concerning American women in the art world is scarce and the existing material rarely mentions religious origins. Since most of the artists involved do not deal with explicitly Jewish themes, and many changed their names or adopted their husbands’ names, deciding which American women artists are Jewish often involves guesswork. Whereas this poses a problem for the researcher, it also indicates to what extent these artists have integrated into the general fabric of American art and society.
Exposure and Repression
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Professional Organizations
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The First Generations
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Abstraction
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Archetypes and Matriarchs
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Exposing Aggression
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Revisioning the Female Body
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Conclusion
Being an American Jewish woman means different things to different people and manifests itself in diverse ways in the lives and work of individual artists. Theoretically, since art is an expression of self, facets of one’s personal identity are necessarily invested in artworks. At times, aspects of an artist’s American and/or female and/or Jewish identity may be clearly discerned in her work. In other cases, however, these cannot be easily traced either by the viewer or by the artist herself. Since American Jewish women artists are not a homogeneous group, their art defies categorization in stylistic, thematic, or any other terms. Yet, whether or not they choose to express American, Jewish, or female aspects of their identity, and regardless of how they decide to do so, numerous Jewish women artists have been making continuous and significant contributions to the visual arts in America.
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