A brush with contradictions

Judith Margolis’s exhibition at Miklat Le’omanut, a gallery in a haredi neighborhood, draws on her secular background and her later religious life.

By DAVID STROMBERG
‘Aliyah/Going Up.’ Featured in group show and catalog for Janco Dada Museum, Ein Hod, 2004. (photo credit: COURTESY JUDITH MARGOLIS)
‘Aliyah/Going Up.’ Featured in group show and catalog for Janco Dada Museum, Ein Hod, 2004.
(photo credit: COURTESY JUDITH MARGOLIS)
Painter and book artist Judith Margolis – whose solo exhibition “Roots in the Sky” is showing at the Miklat Le’omanut Gallery in the Makor Baruch neighborhood – has made criss-crossing journeys throughout her life, both geographically and spiritually.
From the US East Coast, she moved west and joined the counterculture movement in the 1960s, living on the Magic Forest Farm in Oregon. She later became observant, leading an Orthodox Jewish life in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Israel. And for the last 10 years, since leaving Orthodoxy, she has been slowly finding a balance between everything she has gained from her religious life and a retrieval of the freedoms that she believes are important for her art.
“When you’re an artist, it’s your whole life,” says Margolis, 70, and compares the artist’s life to that of a ba’al teshuva, someone who’s returned to religion. “You commit, you sacrifice, it affects how you see the world, how the world sees you.”
Born in the Bronx, New York, but growing up in suburban New Jersey, she understood as early as junior high school that she wanted an alternative to the cardboard-cutout life that others around her seemed to be living. She recalls a classmate holding up her arm at school and showing off that a boy had bought her a bracelet. The classmate said she didn’t like the boy very much, but that because of his gift, she’d let him stick around. For Margolis, this event was symbolic of everything she didn’t want.
She was politically active in high school, joining groups like Ban the Bomb and supporting the Civil Rights Movement, and later joined the feminist movement – which was then forming into a political and social power with new force. After moving to Oregon, she had two children and lived with them on a school bus traveling around the United States. She later met her husband, the late writer David Margolis, with whom she had a third child.
The couple lived together in San Francisco, and under the influence of the late Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach and the House of Love and Prayer that his followers established, the family became observant and joined the religious community. They then moved to Los Angeles, and in the early 1990s they came to Israel – in part to be in a country where the official calendar reflected their religious practices. She says she came to Israel because she saw it as an adventure.
During all her years in the religious community, she continued with her artwork. But she knew that some of the subjects and images that she was painting were not permitted in strictly observant circles. And this created an inner tension that continued to haunt her.
“The tension between the religious and artistic life became intolerable,” she says. “The truth I needed to express didn’t fit with the strictures of religious life.
People think that restricting what you yourself know is true, for the sake of an external truth, has value.”
But for her, this was always difficult, and after her husband’s death 10 years ago, she slowly moved away from Orthodoxy toward a life of artistic expression.
IRONICALLY HER current solo show is in a gallery that’s in the heart of a haredi neighborhood. Miklat Le’omanut – literally “Art Shelter” – was founded by Rabbi Mordechai Arnon and is curated by Noa Lea Cohen with the help of painter Pnina Frank.
The gallery aims to serve people who have returned to religion, while bringing quality visual art to the haredi community.
“People who have a restriction about what they can’t or don’t want to see can’t just go out into the world,” explains Margolis. “Here they see the kind of art that they wouldn’t get to see.”
She says she did not know about the gallery before Cohen approached her to do an exhibition there.
After coming to an opening and seeing that they exhibited quality works, Margolis was convinced she wanted to exhibit there. She was also struck by the audience.
“I saw every kind of Jew here,” she recalls. “There was a Bezalel [Academy of Arts and Design] teacher, a haredi man, someone in jeans, women and men – all kinds of people who came to look at the work that’s here.”
She knew that agreeing to exhibit there would limit the kinds of works she could show. Some of her works – like her series of nudes or scenes of violence from the daily newspapers – would not fit in this context. And the question of the female body was also an issue.
“But any time you work with a curator, you deal with their opinion,” she says. “So I didn’t think it was such a compromise to work within these restrictions.”
The works in the exhibition span over 40 years of artistic production – from her earliest days as an artist to works that have only been completed in recent years. Some of the smaller ones were shown at the beginning of her career in the 1970s, in a home-themed exhibition that also included feminist artist figures like Judy Chicago and Louise Nevelson. Others were only recently exhibited in Israel – like a large collage piece that focuses on the concept and experience of aliya, which she created for the Ein Hod Museum as part of a group of immigrant artists.
“They gave everyone a typewriter,” Margolis recalls of the project.
“A lot of people used it as part of a sculpture. I took a photo and put it into the [collage] work. It’s about language, how we know what we know. It’s about understanding what we see. There’s an image of a Braille chart – but it doesn’t have the bumps, so it’s a paradox. It also has to do with looking for signs and symbols in the world. Artists aren’t disappointed that way – they see the signs and symbols.”
Another set of works, triangles on color fields, deals with the revelation at Mount Sinai.
“Different cultures inhabit different myths,” explains Margolis.
“This is what makes them a nation. Our myth is that the entire nation was gathered at Mount Sinai, the men and women together, and everyone heard the revelation. What makes Jews a nation is not just religion – it’s Mount Sinai.”
FOR HER, art is religious and spiritual. She “observes” it in the sense of always having her tools with her. Art is also a refuge from all the inexplicable violence in the world – from domestic violence and rape, to the kinds of beheadings that are now sweeping parts of the Middle East. She believes that spiritual and political issues are closely related, and she recalls Rabbi Daniel Landes, director of the Pardes Institute of Jewish Studies in Jerusalem, once telling her in Los Angeles that one can’t have spirituality without political consciousness.
“You can’t just have a complacent existence about what makes you comfortable or what you think is correct,” Margolis adds. “You have to look out in the world and see who else needs something and what they need.”
That spiritual and political consciousness is reflected in her choice of works for the exhibition.
“This work doesn’t have the sensuality and sexuality that my other does,” she says. “But each of these works examines a part of what’s true and what’s difficult. There’s a commitment to pursuing that truth. And I’m interested in connecting to people who are passionate about these kinds of things – that’s what having the exhibit is about.”
She reflects that the exhibition at Miklat Le’omanut integrates the aspect of herself that has drawn from nude models since she was 15 and trained in secular art schools like Cooper Union and USC, with the aspect of herself that was religiously observant, studied Torah and Kabbala, and absorbed all that sensibility into her consciousness.
The tension of art and religion remains in her life and work – and is reflected in other tensions, such as that between destiny and chance. In Israel, she says, this tension somehow becomes even more extreme: “A café blows up and the person on the patio is fine, while the person inside is blown to pieces. Is this random? Destined? I ponder that.”
Another kind of tension that occupies her is the contentiousness between the religious and secular communities – which she says she felt when secular people who’d only worked with her on the phone met her for the first time and were surprised she covered her hair.
Yet another kind has to do with male-female relations.
“If there’s a God,” she says, “it seems like a joke that human survival depends on men and women communicating and getting along.”
Margolis believes that art is helpful in healing these tensions – not through answers, but through reflection. Spending time with the work, she says, may calm people down.
“The most exciting thing about being an artist is the mystery, not knowing, having to figure things out – and being okay with not knowing,” she says. In other words, art is a way of inhabiting the tension of the unknown in a safe way.
WHILE SHE was still observant, she felt she had to take a step back with her work and stop herself from pursuing themes or images that she knew were important.
“You’re deeply involved in a system of belief, and that system tells you what you can’t do, but you feel it requires you to have nudity in order to show the truth – that’s a conflict I didn’t know how to manage,” she explains.
And yet 25 years of Orthodoxy also gave her a lot of good things – chief among them a sense of community.
“I liked the women I met who were studying and taking Torah seriously,” she says. “It’s another attempt to examine mystery. I respected that and longed to have some insight.”
And while religious life wasn’t bad in itself, it became increasingly difficult for her to keep a balance between what she thought was right for her life, and the pressure of fitting in and being accepted.
“What I think is sad is that taking on religious restrictions cuts you off from people,” she says.
Nevertheless, leaving Orthodoxy is a process, and she says that when it comes to activities she sees as connected to religious observance, she still does them within a religious framework. This includes her work on a large collage called “The Pursuit of Loneliness” – the center of which is a tree in the shape of a woman.
For a time, she studied with Sarah Yehudit Schneider, a teacher of Torah and Kabbala. During one of their meetings, Schneider showed Margolis something she’d written, which included a short text for each day of the Omer (the seven-week period between Passover and Shavuot). Margolis asked Schneider whether she could illustrate the text, and the result was a limited-edition book titled Countdown to Perfection: Meditations on the Sefirot. It was produced by Yair Medina at Jerusalem Fine Art Prints and is held in collections including the New York Public Library, the UCLA Young Library, UC Berkeley’s Doe Library, and the Yale University Library.
This is only one of many artist books that Margolis has made, starting as early as her days of youthful travel. She has continued with her book work under the auspices of Bright Idea Books. She also writes on gender issues for journals and magazines, and since 1996 she has been the art editor of Nashim: The Journal of Jewish Women’s Studies and Gender Issues.
But most importantly, she continues to work in her studio and to examine the many facets of mystery and tension.
“Being an artist is a worldview that’s extremely transforming,” she says. “You don’t choose art to make a lot of money. Success is unpredictable – you could do your best work and no one could see it. I’m not as well known [as artists like Chicago or Nevelson]. But I have a consistent body of work – art and writing – and it’s out there in the world. If you keep at something long enough, and it’s good, eventually people notice.”