A Summary of Our 2026 Award Recipients

The 2026 Bertha Anolic Israel Travel Award:   

    Deborah Fischer, a second-year MFA student at the Rhode Island School of Design, is the recipient of the 2026 Bertha Anolic Visual Arts Israel Travel Award. Her proposed project, Irrigation: Sculptures in the Field, considers the agricultural field as a site for sculptural inquiry, where cultivation and wildness, control and vulnerability, coexist. Deborah will develop her project at Kibbutz Kfar Haruv in the southern Golan Heights, where she has an existing relationship with the community. Working directly with farmers, land managers, and agricultural coordinators, she will approach the field not as a backdrop but as a working site where social, historical, and ecological systems intersect. The project will result in small-scale sculptural interventions integrated into agricultural infrastructure, including irrigation lines and planting grids. Using plastic, flexible materials, and organic elements, the sculptures will respond to water, sunlight, wind, and plant growth. Her research will explore the histories of plants cultivated in the fields, from biblical crops and historically introduced species to contemporary hybrids. Deborah will interpret the landscape through the four traditional frameworks of Peshat (literal), Remez (symbolic), Derash (ethical), and Sod (mystical). Video, photography, sketches, and writing will document the evolving relationships among the sculptures, environment, and community.

The 2026 Naomi Anolic Early Career Jewish Visual Arts Award:   

    We are pleased to announce Uriel Caspi is the recipient of the 2026 Naomi Anolic Early Career Jewish Visual Arts Award. Uriel has been drawn to clay since childhood, discovering in it a spiritually and emotionally resonant medium for expressing thoughts, memory, and experience. His practice moves between vessel, body, and sculpture, combining ancient craft traditions with contemporary studio processes. Inspired by Middle Eastern archaeological remnants, Jewish-Israeli domestic objects, and futuristic aesthetics, Uriel reinterprets material culture through a global, multicultural lens. Rooted in his own nomadic experience across geographies and cultures, the work explores how individuals carry and reconstruct a sense of home amid displacement, conflict, and transformation. Themes of shelter, belonging, resilience, and shared humanity have become increasingly urgent against today’s global instability and regional tensions. By preserving nearly lost Mediterranean clay-modeling and glazing techniques, while incorporating digital fabrication, the artist connects past and future. Uriel has been invited to present a body of work at the Korean Ceramics Biennale at the Gyeonggi Museum of Contemporary Ceramic Art in South Korea, where the work will engage an international audience in questions of refuge, identity, and belonging. 

The 2026 Isaac Anolic Jewish Book Arts Award:   

      We are excited to announce Marcia Cohen is the recipient of the 2026 Isaac Anolic Jewish Book Arts Award. Marcia will create a one-of-a-kind artist’s book that operates, not only as a book, but as a small, interactive stage. Titled Mazel, the book will be deeply informed by Jewish folklore and mystical traditions, particularly the history of supernatural practices in which texts, diagrams, glyphs, amulets, talismans, and segulahs carry special significance. Using vintage Hebrew and Yiddish typewriters, Hebrew type and fonts, stencils, papercuts, and embossing, Marcia will reinterpret these historical forms as contemporary tokens of belonging, remembrance, and good luck. The project will extend the artist’s exploration of Jewish iconography and otherworldly imagery while establishing a unified visual language across her interdisciplinary practice. Mazel creates an evolving universe in which readers have agency to reposition characters, redirect scenes, and shape the story. The work will hover between book and theater, drawing inspiration from tabletop toy theater, Fluxus books, and the playful language of the Beat poets.