Artist Makes The Repairs

“We’re whole and broken at the same time,” said artist Judy Sirota Rosenthal, in delving into a concept that has fueled her art for decades.

She invoked the Japanese practice of kintsugi, whereby pottery is repaired by filling the breaks with gold, drawing attention to the break and making it part of the object’s history. She found resonance between that Asian practice and a lyric from Canadian songwriter Leonard Cohen, who drew from Jewish, Buddhist, and other belief systems in the lyrics to his songs: ​“There’s a crack, a crack in everything / That’s how the light gets in.” She described a life in which working on art, on oneself, and on the world around us were part of the same thing.

“Making for me has been the work of my soul,” she said.

That was the opening to ​“Wrestling with Wholeness: A Mystical and Tribal Practice of Art,” a talk Rosenthal gave about her life as an artist to an audience of about 40 over Zoom last week.

The talk was part of ​“Coffee Break and Culture,” an ongoing online series hosted by the Jewish Community Center of Greater New Haven that meets every Thursday at 10 a.m. (The next talk, on May 14, features artist Eileen Eder.)

“I went to college, I did what I was supposed to do, and then I went to California in the mid-‘60s,” Rosenthal said of her origins as an artist. She was exposed to work by Ben Shahn, among others, who she described as early teachers. ​“I met their work and thought ​‘this is what I want to do,’” she said. ​“I need to be a maker. I need to use my hands.”

She started off as a card maker and quickly began larger pieces. This went hand in hand, she said, with studying Torah with a group of women; she ​“was drawn into the Kabbalistic world. She began to study ​“an embodied Kabbalah.” She also began to paint. She started with rainbows. She went through a ​“difficult time,” she said, and made what she described as ​“my favorite painting,” a black rainbow. For Rosenthal, it wasn’t just an expression of anguish; it was a depiction of the crack where the light gets in.

She moved to painting circles. Rather than looking for an answer to her questions, she thought, perhaps ​“the emptiness was the answer.” As in artist, she was drawn to gaps; ​“it left room for people to have their own words.” The open-ended nature of the questioning was built into the pieces; Rosenthal may have had her own motivations for making the art she did, but she didn’t feel the need to impart a specific message to her viewers. ​“This is for me Kabbalistic, and it’s the four universes,” she said, ​“but it can be anything for you.” She created paintings that ​“ask the viewer” what it means to them, she said — whether she was making art for a commission, or to adorn the synagogue for each of her three daughters’ bat mitzah ceremonies.

“We all have so many parts to ourselves. We all have so many colors,” she said.

Later on she made a series of 10 pieces and ​“went to an Orthodox friend and said, ​‘I have a few quotations, but what resonates for you?’” Her friend gave her a few meaningful quotations. Among them was a statement from ​“a young rabbi who died in the Holocaust.” His cousin had gotten out of Germany before the Holocaust began and the rabbi wrote letters to him. The quote was in the last letter the rabbi wrote to him. ​“Thank you for creating this,” the friend said to Rosenthal after seeing Rosenthal’s piece. ​“You have allowed this rabbi to live on.”

Into The Woods

From painting, Rosenthal moved to using found objects and doing installations. ​“I was walking in the woods. I found these sticks and brought them home and started working with them,” Rosenthal said. Her first piece invoked the natural world and our place to it, with sticks representing water, animals, spirit, man, voice, trees, nuts, seeds, wind and song. ​“The all gold one is the unknown,” Rosenthal said. ​“Having a lot of respect for the unknown was the completion of this particular piece.”

She decided to try different versions of the form. ​“Having been studying Torah with my friends, I decided to make the seven days of creation,” she said. The piece, from the late 1980s, now resides at a rabbinical college. ​“I did do Shabbat differently,” she said, referring to the stick representing that day, ​“and I had to rip the whole thing because it didn’t feel right.”

She moved on to making ritual objects, starting with mezuzot. To make the forms she wanted, she dried the reed that comprises the body of the piece for a year before working with it. ​“They’re all made by hand and there are no glues — it’s all held together by tension,” she said.

She fashioned a Miriam’s Cup — a feminist addition to the Jewish seder with the aim of making the celebration more inclusive — from a pomegranate. The fruit has ​“613 seeds, supposedly,” she said — ​“seeds of life.” Like many of her artistic ideas, she said, ​“it came through me.”

Her career also led her to an installation of prayer flags at Chesterwood, an artists’ retreat in Stockbridge, Mass. For Rosenthal, the idea of prayer flags was ​“many roads up the same mountain” — across cultures, flags sent ​“messages skyward with all your prayers and longings.” Flags were adorned with mesages in Sanskrit, and the character for chi. She made hundreds of flags for the installation; they were ​“made to disintegrate” over several months. As a kind of signature, she used a dot, though Rosenthal found herself changing its form. Sometimes the dot became a circle, ​“a mouth opened in prayer, because prayer can be rageful.”

Serendipity played a role as the flags weathered in the woods. ​“At the end of the exhibition, when it was time for me to remove it, a spider had made a web the same size as the flags, with the same circle in the middle,” she said.

Throughout her talk, Rosenthal had alluded to the complicated emotions that defined her familial relationships, particularly her mother. ​“Art has enabled me to work with my emotion, wrestle with it, and allow some form to come out of it,” she said. One piece was a series of objects made from her mother’s stockings. ​“It is read Hebriacally,” she said, with each stocking representing a facet of her mother and her relationships to others. The eggshells referred to ​“birth,” and ​“how we often have to walk on eggshells in intimate relationships.” She included rubber bands because ​“my father used to save rubber bands,” she said. But it also nodded toward ​“the tension in the mother-daughter relationship.”

The piece was originally shown in a cultural institution where ​“a couple people in the institution had a difficult time with this piece.” Rosenthal said. ​“It provoked something inside them.”

For Rosenthal, this was a path to a broader question. ​“What is art supposed to do?” she said. Maybe it’s there ​“to comfort us,” and ​“maybe have us wrestle with our own unfinished emotions.”

She did many installations that she didn’t document. ​“I like installation, like the prayer flags, because I can be in full-body relationship to it. I can be a participant in the installation itself.” There were exceptions, like Seventh Heaven. ​“Many Jews will say ​‘we don’t believe in heaven,’” Rosenthal said, ​“but there are references to ​‘heavens.’” Rosenthal pointed out this was another ​“cross-cultural idea. People believe in three, seven, and thirteen heavens across cultures…. My ancestry is Jewish and that’s my starting point,” she added, so ​“I needed to create it.”

“I use a lot of stones in my work,” she said. In one piece, ​“the rocks are our burdens and what we have to offer to the great mystery. Our burdens are our gifts and our teachers.” People were invited to leave messages at the installation, ​“their burdens and the wishes.” Some left icons of St. Christopher, who finds lost tings. Others left origami. ​“It enabled people to participate at the level of gesture,” she said.

Another piece used both rocks and potatoes. ​“The potatoes would sprout at the end of the exhibit and the stones would not,” she said. ​“We as humans have to balance different aspects of ourselves — some we like, some we don’t like.”

Rosenthal went to Bali ​“to study with a teacher. Photography was not my main thing,” she said. ​“When I was in Bali, I really understood how so much of Jewish wisdom and the wisdom of other cultures was about … the same concept — the same wrestling with what it is to be human.”

As a younger woman, ​“when I was going through a difficult time in San Francisco,” her therapist told her, ​“you’re an artist and I didn’t know it.” A second therapist later in life offered advice on what to impart to her growing children. ​“Teach them to have courage. That’s the most important thing you can teach your daughters: have courage.”

She is now a healer herself, helping others. ​“There are forces in the unseen that can help us if we’re open to them,” she said. Her healing work draws from several cultures. Among other things, she has found herself ​“helping people write ethical wills.”

“It has been very moving for people because they encounter parts of themselves that are unfinished and unresolved” in the process of writing, Rosenthal said. ​“I can support them in finding their way through this challenge — especially in these pandemic times — of leaving behind your values, not your objects. That’s what’s essential.”

She works a lot with mothers and daughters. ​“If the relationships with daughters are great, what has made them great? If they’re complicated or unresolved, can they be resolved? Can repairs happen?” Rosenthal said. ​“There is a lineage all the way back, and what is passed on can be unseen yet extraordinary. Sometimes people wait until the deathbed to do this repair … but time is lost. There are ways of working … that allow for repair to happen.”

The next talk in the JCC’s ​“Coffee Break and Culture” series happens at 10 a.m. on May 14, featuring artist Eileen Eder.