QUEER LIFE

How does unsafety and exclusion affect personal relationships with Judaism and Jewish community?

Curatorial statement by Liora Ostroff

Poet Joy Ladin and ceramicist Nicki Green address queer life and emotional safety through their respective media.

Nicki Green describes the ongoing process of creating safety for herself both through her practice, and by being visibly Jewish and trans. Her queered ritual objects both address the extent to which queer people have been excluded and alienated from Jewish life, and participate in the expansive project of reimagining Jewish life and ritual for marginalized bodies.

Joy Ladin’s Ready and Changing The Subject describe the effects of fearing her self-expression: fear of change, fear of cruelty or violence, “self-loathing” and shame. Her poems allude to the strength of Shekhinah as the “empowering alternative to fear's disabling voice and degraded reflections of ourselves.”

As you experience this work, you may consider: how does unsafety and exclusion affect personal relationships with Judaism and Jewish community? How do we imagine the Jewish future, and safety for marginalized bodies and voices?

A photograph of Nicki Green's sculpture, Sabbath Crock, a white, cream and dark blue vessel with figural imagery and symbolism, including hands, triangles, leaves and figures walking.

Nicki Green, Sabbath Crock, Glazed stoneware, 2017

Featured artists

 
A photograph of Nicki Green's sculpture, Sabbath Crock, a white, cream and dark blue vessel with figural imagery and symbolism, including hands, triangles, leaves and figures walking.

Nicki Green, Sabbath Crock, Glazed stoneware, 2017

Nicki Green is a transdisciplinary artist working primarily in clay. Originally from New England, she completed her BFA in sculpture from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2009 and her MFA in Art Practice from the University of California, Berkeley in 2018. Her sculptures, ritual objects and various flat works explore topics of history preservation, conceptual ornamentation and aesthetics of otherness.

 Green has exhibited her work internationally, notably at the New Museum, New York; The Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco; Rockelmann & Partner Gallery, Berlin, Germany. She has contributed texts to numerous publications including Transgender Studies Quarterly and Fermenting Feminism, Copenhagen. In 2019, Green was a finalist for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s SECA Award, a recipient of an Arts/Industry Residency from the John Michael Kohler Art Center, among other awards. Green lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area.

 

Joy Ladin (Photo by Lisa Ross)

Joy Ladin has long worked at the tangled intersection of literature, Judaism, and transgender identity, publishing a memoir of gender transition, National Jewish Book Award finalist Through the Door of Life the first book-length work of Jewish trans theology, Lambda Literary and Triangle Award finalist, The Soul of the Stranger: Reading God and Torah from a Transgender Perspective, and nine books of poetry, including The Book of Anna, recently reissued by EOAGH Press. She became a nationally recognized speaker on trans and Jewish identity after her transition at Yeshiva University made her the first openly transgender employee of an Orthodox Jewish institution, and has been named to both the “Forward Fifty” list of influential or courageous Jews and to LGBTQ Nation's Top 50 Transgender Americans list, and featured on a number of NPR programs, including an “On Being” with Krista Tippett interview that has been rebroadcast several times. Her writing has been recognized with a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Fulbright Scholarship, an American Council of Learned Societies Research Fellowship, and a Hadassah Brandeis Institute Research Fellowship, among other honors. Episodes of her online conversation series, “Containing Multitudes,” are available here, and her writing is available here.