BIOGRAPHIES

Joyce Abrams, a New York City artist, was educated at Columbia University (MFA) and at Cooper Union (BFA) has exhibited widely throughout the New York City gallery scene with painting, drawing and mixed media. . She has also curated exhibitions and is in many public and private collections.

Melinda Smith Altshuler, based in Los Angeles, has a degrees from California State University, Northridge. She has exhibited in many exhibitions, especially with her installations and works using found objects. As co-executive director of SITE, an artists' non-profit organization, she has curated and moderated many events and exhibitions in the 1990s.

Lynne Avadenka is a professional calligrapher, and an instructor of Book Arts and Typography, having taught at Wayne State University and the University of Michigan. She is proprietor of Land Marks Press, which has produced limited edition books and broadsides, especially with Jewish themes. She has curated several exhibitions in Michigan, received an NEA and a Creative Artist Grant from the Michigan Council for the Arts. Her bookworks have been included in many collections such as the Library of Congress, Israel Museum, New York Public Library and others.

Beth Bachenheimer has an MFA from Vermont College in Montpellier, a BFA from California Institute of the Arts, and is Los Angeles-based. She is known for her mask making, but her bookwork in the exhibition documents the annihilation of her family during the Nazi era, except for her father who was saved and sent to the United States. She has appeared in countless exhibitions through California with her work on masks, paper, installations and bookworks.

Marion A. Baker is known for her etchings, linocuts and ceramic tiles. In 1978, she learned letterpress printing at the Women's Building in Los Angeles, and from that time she has made artist books on her own press. She has been educated at UC Berkeley and UCLA. She has had many solo shows, as well as having been invited to countless exhibitions with her bookwork.

Susan Bee is the daughter of Jewish immigrants to the U.S, both parents being artists. She has a B.A. in art history and painting, an M.A. in Creative Art from Hunter College. She has participated in countless group shows since 1972 to the present, as well as having solo shows of her books and paintings at Granary Books in 1997 and the Virginia Lust Gallery in New York in 1992. She has also been co-editor, designer and publisher of M/E/A/N/I/N/G, a journal of contemporary art issues, along with Mira Schor. This book was done in collaboration with her husband and longtime collaborator, Charles Bernstein, dealing with some of the dangers and pitfalls of innocence.

Miriam Beerman of Montclair, New Jersey, is the oldest artist in the show, a painter, printmaker for nearly 50 years. The past five years has involved the artist in making one-of-a-kind bookworks. Her book Survival includes drawings made in the spirit of automatism and chance, reflecting a sea of subconscious imagery with words by Jewish poets and writers, i.e. Primo Levi, Paul CŽlan, Rose Drachler, Adrienne Rich, Denise Levertov, Eugenia Ginzburg, Osip Mandelstram and others who constantly inspire her.

Gaza Bowen of Santa Cruz, California is a self-taught artist whose reputation for making art in the form of shoes has been renowned, but her own heritage appears in The Secret Game, a memory of being born Jewish in the South during World War II with the text evoking a secure, cheery American middle class. The book tells the story of playing in her best friend's attic their self-invented game of "Anne Frank". The bookwork speaks of the moment of encounter between two cultures.

Jo-Ann Brody is a graduate of Reed College and the Portland Museum Art School in Oregon. Brody, resident of Peekskill, New York, has been a ceramist for the past 30 years, creating female torsos and figures in clay. This, her first bookwork, celebrates the life of her and her daughter, a kind of Ketuba in clay. The book speaks of past, present and future.

Rose Ann Chasman of Chicago, Illinois has been working in book arts for over 20 years including Hebrew calligraphy and the traditional folk-art of papercutting, pushing the boundaries of these crafts with innovative materials and techniques. The letters of the Hebrew alphabet, traditionally seen as G-d's first creation and used in mystic meditation, are an important element in her work. Although having received formal art training at Antioch College, University of Chicago, and the Art Institute of Chicago, her papercutting and calligraphic skills are self-taught. Her work in recent years has become simultaneously both larger and smaller, entirely hand-cut and hand-made.

Deborah Davidson, a resident of the Boston area, has been tracing her family whose roots go back to 1350, where the family in Spain was expelled after the Inquisition and landed in Italy. The bookwork in this exhibition, Voce, is a response to her maternal great-grandmother's 8 letters written from an internment camp in Italy in 1944. She was killed at Auschwitz very soon after the last letter was written. Davidson's response to the political is the personal.

Barbara Drucker of Santa Monica, California is a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, who has been involved in the making and exhibiting of artist books for many years. Born a Jew in New York, she has always been interested in all religions and all peoples. After going to Greece to experience the Greek Easter religious celebrations and rituals firsthand, she saw connections between psychology, religion and artmaking. Through subsequent trips to Greece, she learned more about Christianity, its current practice and the meaning it holds for a whole group of people, and thus more about the its source, Judaism. She explores through her art the relationship to both sets of beliefs, feeling nurtured by and outside of both.

Evelyn Eller of Forest Hills, New York was educated at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, Pratt Graphic Center, and the Art Students League, among other institutions. She has been in countless group shows throughout the world and has had solo shows for the past 18 years. Being a traveler, she incorporates her experiences in "travel" bookworks.

Dorothy Field of Cobble Hill, British Columbia in Canada grew up in an assimilated family in New York in a town where being Jewish seemed totally normal. When she moved to a farm in rural Canada, she found herself living at the edge of the Diaspora. Trying to educate herself to figure out what "Jewishness" meant, she sees that the core of orientation of her Jewishness grows out of the idea of tikkun olam, the repair of the world. In her work, she tries to speak out even when it feels risky and to work towards integration of the shadow side, the Other, the Jew, on a personal and political level. She has studied handmade papermaking and taught at Paper & Book Intensive. She lectures widely on Asian paper and has been in many exhibitions.

Diane Fine is Associate Professor of Art at Plattsburgh State University of New York, having graduated in Graphic Arts emphasizing printmaking and the book arts from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is proprietor of the Moonkosh Press and is represented in collections including the New York Public Library, the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Yale University Art Gallery. The source of Forever and Ever is the desire to understand the role that Judaism plays in coping with breast cancer in her family, her sister Beth diagnosed over 4 years ago. As the sisters read and talked to their rabbis and to each other, they found wonder, comfort, and a shared challenge in learning to wear teffilin (the metaphor of the sealed box as container for the answers). Their study, and this book, has enlightened them with its message of healing.

Rose-Lynn Fisher, is a photographer, painter and digital artist. She is represented in many public collections throughout the world and has been the recipient of many grants and residencies.

Faiya Fredman of La Jolla, California was educated at UCLA. She has had many solo shows, as well as participating in several group shows. Her bookworks reside in many public collections.

Vered Galor, a photographer and teacher of photography living in Woodland Hills, California, ws born in Czechoslovakia and grew up in Israel. She has been a glass sculptor, then turned to art consulting and independent curating. A lecturer and facilitator, she returned to studio work choosing photography as a departure point. Her bookwork relates the history of her parents during World War II during the Nazi regime, her own beginnings, and leads up to the war of 1967, from war to war.. It is powerful and ingenious.

Ruth Ginsberg-Place , who lives in Boston, is a graduate of Syracuse University with an M.F.A. and of Simmons School of Social Work with a Master of Social Work. She has been in exhibitions for over 25 years and is a photographer and printmaker.

Sylvia Glass of Woodland Hills, California makes bookworks of the humblest materials including rocks, fossils, twigs and a myriad of found objects. She recently had a retrospective at the Jan Baum Gallery in Los Angeles.

Beth Grossman of Northern California is a painter, arts organizer, theater artist, as well as a graphic designer. With an MFA in Performance Studies, she has studied in Malaysia, Oslo, Norway and Tianjin, China. She has participated in countless exhibitions of her project, Passages: Jewish Women's Immigration and Family History, a six-room temporary public art installation.

c.j. grossman, a San Francisco resident, has an MFA from California College of Arts and Crafts. She has participated in many group exhibitions and has been a teacher of art and master bookbinder for many years. Socially conscious, grossman has explored her Jewish roots in relation to her lifelong commitment to struggle for civil rights for all people. Her work is a bridge between education and understanding among people.

Carol Hamoy of New York City has had solo exhibitions for the past twenty years, and has also participated in many groups shows. A product of the Art Students League, Hamoy has developed her art from a feminist point of view and has consistently used Jewish themes in her work, dealing with ethereal messages and universal truths. . She often uses artifacts from the garment industry which alludes to her family's work.

Gloria Helfgott, now of Southern California, but formerly from Connecticut, is an expert in bookmaking and binding and has been an important educator both in the East and now on the West Coast for techniques in bookmaking. She brings exquisite craftsmanship with significant content in her bookworks.

Sandra Jackman of New York City has been exhibiting bookworks and assemblage, collage for many years. She has work in collections throughout the United States. Her emphasis on bookworks stems from her wide reading and her ability to transfer information into sculptural constructions in book form.

Jacqueline Jacobs was born in Chile but now is a pediatrician in La Jolla, California. She is the wife of a physician and mother of two physicians. She has been in many exhibitions in California, with works in ceramic, sculpture, weaving and textile design, as well as bookworks. Her dual career in Healing and the Visual Arts is complementary.

Tatana Kellner was born in Prague, Czechoslovakia but is now a resident of Kingston, New York where she directs the Women's Studio Workshop in Rosendale, New York for over 20 years. She has an MFA from Rochester Institute of Technology and a BA from the University of Toledo. She has created many artist books, and her work is in many public collections.

Karen Klein of Cambridge, MA is a professor at Brandeis University and has appeared in many groups shows, as well as solo exhibitions. She is very influenced by literature in her visual work which includes sculpture, as well as works on paper.

Lisa Kokin is a self-taught Richmond, California artist who makes bookworks in order to express herself through images and layers of meaning through the incorporation of found objects such as phrases, maps, buttons, pictures, and other fabrics. Re-discovering her Jewish heritage has allowed Kokin to turn to the medium most associated with the "People of the Book". She has had many one-person exhibitions, as well as participating in many group shows. Six Books are Hebrew books which are exhibited as mangled books covered with cowgut and acrylic medium. The books were a reaction to Kokin's visit to Buchenwald. She also has a keen sense of humor and Babes in Goyland bring out a cunning and smile which can only be realized by someone Jewish who teaches in a Catholic school.

Elaine Langerman is a Washington, DC artist, graduate of the American University and the University of Maryland. She has been in several one-person exhibitions, as well as group shows for more than 20 years. She is a painter and bookmaker, whose Sefer consists of woven paper pages to signify how the sacred and profane are woven together in our lives, and how we intertwine our lives with each other. Her palette is joyous and bright, mostly using acrylic paints, and she tries to create realms of enchantment for the heart where it might find play and adventure.

Stephanie Later is a major bookbinder and artist,. a graduate of Syracuse University School of Fine Arts, Parsons and the Art Students League of New York. First an illustrator and window display designer, she turned to bookmaking and especially bookbinding, receiving a New York State grants for the conservation of books at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Her Song of Songs is the result of intense research of collections of illuminated manuscripts, and this particular subject matter has biblical, historical and sentimental significance. Each page is hand calligraphed and illustrated using gouache and gold acrylic paint. The illustrations depict the fervent love of King Solomon and his wife. The bookwork is housed in a box of cut-out wooden boards with inlays of faux ivory panels and some semi-precious and glass stones. She lives in New York City.

Jenni Lukac who now resides in Vilnius, Lithuania, spent a residency in Portugal to study the history of the Crypto-Jews still living in that country. She also has created a series of artist books, collage and video installations which addressed the personal narrative of, and the political persecutions against Jews in Europe in the 1930's and 40's. Formerly from Virginia, she now travels and resides with her husband wherever he is assigned.

Barbara Magnus lives in Los Angeles and creates labor-intensive installations and bookworks. is actually an English-German dictionary from 1897. She is known to alter the literal and the practical to expose the book's subtext through form. These "wheels" and the extreme "dog-eared" fold of the pages refer to repeated use, marking one's place, and assimilating the new while holding onto the old. This dictionary was a compromise for her relatives to find an English-Yiddish dictionary. In addition to vocabulary, grammar, usage and useful phrases, are letters and customary responses concerning personal and business circumstances of the day.

Judith Margolis of Jerusalem, Israel studied at Columbia University and Cooper Union in New York City. She began making limited edition artist books in 1969. She moved to Los Angeles and received an MFA from University of Southern California in painting and film graphics. She has recently made aliya to Israel with her husband David and daughter Hodya. Is has recently founded Bright Idea Books, a Jerusalem-based publishing company devoted to producing limited edition artist books and contemporary fiction.

Kathi Martin of West Hills, California trained in printmaking at the University of Washington and then having received an MFA in Studio Art, she began teaching at Taft High School and at California State University, Northridge. She incorporates found objects, stitchery, and appropriated imagery into her work. Her connection with her grandmother, Eva Michelson, and her connection with Yiddish meld in this Bubby book, which shows the richness of her experiences as a Jewish girl, going to Temple, summer camp, and having a cousin as a Rabbi. But what a grandmother, who is historified with the memories of her grandchild.

Barbara Milman of Davis, California was formerly a lawyer for 25 years, defending the civil rights of American citizens. She now is a printmaker and bookmaker, emphasizing interviews with Holocaust survivors, creating each story with 12 prints, constituting a chapter of the book, Shadow of Death, a limited edition bookwork. All 60 of the prints have been included in a paperback book, Light in the Shadows, published in 1997 by Jonathan David Publisher.

Beverly Naidus of Shelburne Falls, MA was a professor at California State University, Long Beach before moving to Massachusetts. A socially aware and politically active artist, Naidus has created a bookwork that looks at secular/cultural Jewish identity in relation to assimilation, using scanned images from old magazines and an old photo of immigrants on a boat.

Miriam Neiger of Jerusalem was born in Slovakia and came to Israel in 1949. A graduate of Bezalel Art Academy, she has exhibited many one-person shows as well as group exhibitions throughout North American and Israel. She is also a poet.

Laurel Paley has an MFA from Claremont Graduate School and a BA from Smith College. She is an expert in calligraphy as well as digital media. Having appeared in many solo exhibitions as well as group shows, she is also a faculty member of several colleges in the Southern California area. She is a painter, printmaker and bookmaker.

Gail Rebhan is Director of Media Technology Studies at Trinity College in Washington, DC. Her work is in many public collections including the Corcoran Gallery of Art, National Museum of American Art, J. Paul Getty Museum and Polaroid Corporation. She produced an artist's book, "Mother - Son Talk" at Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, NY. Her work is included in several other books including the anthology "Reframings: New American Feminist Photographies" and "Our Grandmothers: Photographs by 75 Women Photographers." Exhibitions include: Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Folkwang Museum, Essen, Germany; School 33 Art Center, Baltimore, Maryland. Rebhan has an M.F.A. from California Institute of the Arts.

Marilyn Rosenberg of Peekskill, New York has been making bookworks for many years, having been included in countless group exhibitions as well as solo shows. This is one of the first years that Rosenberg has been involved in Jewish themes, but one was a Ketubah for her younger daughter and this bookwork on Babi Yar, which commemorates the massacre of murdered Jewish women in Russia.

Eva-Lynn Ratoff is a calligrapher of great note since 1976, combining her great talents with bookbinding, papermaking, marbling, and painting. Inspired by Torah, prayers, songs and images, her work expresses her feelings about Judaism. She is the official scribe of Temple Ahavat Shalom and has exhibited in many galleries in the Southern California area. She feels that with words and color, her art reflects her soul, bringing to others moments of spirituality and to remind people what it is to be a Jew. She resides in Northridge, California.

Sophia Rosenberg of Victoria, British Columbia (Canada) is a graduate of the University of Victoria. She is involved in papermaking, bookmaking, mask making and various painting techniques. She is also a published poet and author/illustrator of a children's book.

Linda Rubinstein lives in Putney, Vermont and is the education curator at the Brattleboro Museum. She is a graduate of Hunter College. She and her sister, Judith Stein, grew up in a Jewish family with a mother who was an artist. Rubinstein has been making one-of-a-kind bookworks for many years and has been in many group exhibitions, as well as solo exhibitions in New England.

Alyssa C. Salomon of Richmond, Virginia has an MBA from University of Chicago and a BA from Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio. Her background is in textile art, from which her one-of-a-kind bookworks have evolved as visual poems.

Robyn Sassen lives in Johannesburg, South Africa having a BA in Fine Arts and an MA in Art History from the University of South Africa. She has had several solo exhibitions, as well as commissions. Being a woman and a Jew in South Africa creates a number of intersecting dynamics, of both a political and an intellectual nature, within which she perceives herself and allows her to continue to make work.

Miriam Schaer of Brooklyn, New York is a teacher who has made bookworks for many years, appearing in countless one-person and group exhibitions. Her bookworks tend to be kinetic sculptures created with papers, fabrics, beads and objects. Eve's Meditation is in the form of a serpent, a book and a fruit, the shape of which fills the serpent with the spirit of hidden knowledge. In Eve's Meditation, the path to knowing is through the belly of the snake. Knowledge is dangerous and apart, allied with temptation, acquired in disobedience, and published by shameö all signs of the significance of the outsider, the guest denied the feast, and characteristic of her own relationship to Judaism.

Helen Schamroth of Auckland, New Zealand was born in Crakow, Poland. Her remarkable bookwork, New World, Old Story, tells her life's story from Poland to Europe to Melbourne, where she grew up, married a New Zealander and moved to Auckland. She has three daughters, two of whom are gourmet chefs, and the other a journalist in London. She was invited to install a Holocaust Memorial piece in the room dedicated to the Holocaust in the Auckland City Art Gallery, which recently opened. She has written and lectured about arts and crafts and is busy writing a book about the craft artists in New Zealand.

Karen Shaw lives in Baldwin, New York, the product of a very secular Jewish household. She has been making bookworks for many years and has explored the cabalistic system of Gematria which is the number/language system exhibited in her bookworks.

Elena Siff lives in Santa Monica, California as a major assemblage artist, who has appeared in many exhibitions throughout the country, as well as being a curator of many book, assemblage and mail art exhibitions. She is also the co-curator of the international exhibition, Women Beyond Borders. Her bookwork, Rootless: On the Road with my Jewish Half, is the result of a personal journey for her, to put her in touch with her long-departed grandparents and their three sons, one of whom was her fascinating father, Philip, who basically ignored his Jewish identity for all of her life with him. Finding letters, documents, articles that her father left her, when he died on her birthday in 1981, she has reconstructed the great tragedy in her father's life. She has used an old toy truck as her bookform, and the pages are the truck's cargo, the content being the actual photos, letters and documents that she has discovered on the journey back to her Jewish half.

Franca Sonnino lives in Rome, Italy and has had many solo exhibitions, as well as group shows. She has been a painter, but has also done many bookworks, involved herself in many mail art exhibitions, as well as textile shows.

Ruth Wallen of San Diego, California is a lecturer at University of California, San Diego at La Jolla. She has done several pubic art commission, has had solo ehibitions/performances, has been in many group exhibitions, , has been a Fulbright Scholar in the Mexico Border Lectures Program, and has worked with Las Comadres on the California-Mexico border.

Ellen Wallenstein-Sea lives in New York City, has an MFA in Photography fro Pratt Institute and a BA in Art History from SUNY at Stony Brook, New York. She has been a photo archivist for several agencies in New York, taught at the University of Texas at Austin. She has curated several exhibitions, and is in several public collections.

Ruth Weisberg is the Dean of the School of Fine Arts at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, former president of the Women's Caucus for Art, former president of the College Art Association, and noted printmaker and painter. She came upon a found photograph in a friend's loft in New York City, which had been discovered on the streets of New York. The image of a classroom of Jewish girls with their teacher moved her deeply. Five years ago, she asked her friend for the photograph to be used in a future work of art. Her "Forgotten Faces Renamed" is that piece, in which each child is given a Yiddish name transliterated in English, and the book is a sensitive viewing of the face of each girl as Weisberg and her friend, Sabell Bender, discover their names by just looking at these images.

Gayle Wimmer lives in Tucson, Arizona where she is a professor of Art at the University of Arizona. She has been a visiting Fulbright Professor in Haifa, Israel and has had an International Research Grant to do research in contemporary artists in Poland. She has been in many group exhibitions in North America, Poland and Bulgaria.