A Summary of Our 2022 Award Recipients

The 2022 Bertha Anolic Israel Travel Award: Won by Meirav Ong, an MFA candidate at Cranbrook Academy of Art, is a mixed-media fiber artist who says her work is her form of prayer: The physical labor – stitching, twisting, stretching, wrapping, pulling, gathering, tying, and knotting – are expressive acts of listening to her maternal ancestors. Her research opportunities in Israel will focus on the overlap between material, academic, spiritual, historical and embodied research, as well as the opportunity to study in a place with so much personal and cultural significance. She intends to synthesize this research into an interactive installation for Sukkot, expanding on themes of embodied prayer and grief (personal, communal, ancestral).

The 2022 Naomi Anolic Early Career Jewish Visual Arts Award: Won by Tamar Segev, her work is informed by a family roots trip in 2019 to the former Nazi ghetto in Lodz, Poland, where her grandmother was imprisoned from 1940-44. She constructs paintings from cut pieces of painted canvas, fragments of memory and then stitches these fragments to a new canvas support, a slow and arduous process. The Award will help fund her attendance at the GlogauAIR Residency for three months in January 2023, and an extended stay in the North Rhine-Westphalia region of Germany, helping her to continue referencing and remembering her specific family history through stitching, while investigating a broader history and memory of Jewish experience.

The 2022 Isaac Anolic Jewish Book Arts Award: Won by Mirta Kupferminc, an accomplished book artist, her proposal is to make a one of a kind book, uniting the concept of The Dybbuk, with a real story of her grandparents -  an untold story that happened during the Shoa and was hidden for 70 years. The dybbuk, in Jewish folklore, is a disembodied human spirit that, because of former sins, wanders restlessly until it finds a haven in the body of a living person. She will use mixed media, lithography, colored pencil, gold leaf and collage. The book will be built as a 3-D theatrical model consisting of three levels. The book, Mirta says, “will be a testimony that will give freedom to many “dybbuks” that all descendants from Holocaust survivors suffer, for all the stories that were silent”.