“I loved him with intensity. I hated with him intensity. There was no middle ground.” So states the protagonist about her father in Laurie Sandell’s comic strip The Imposter’s Daughter. Sandell is one of eighteen female Jewish graphic artists to be part of the exhibition Graphic Details: Confessional Comics by Jewish Women which opened at the YU Museum on Sunday, September 25th along with Prophecy of Place and Jews on Vinyl.
Sandell’s statement holds true of the exhibition, which, like each individual autobiographical comic strip, is filled with intensity. There is no middle ground. These women rant and rage about their sex lives, their interpersonal relationships, their Jewish lives, and their political lives. All of these spheres are graphically merged in the form of comic strips. In this exhibit, “[n]othing is off limits,” as Sarah Glidden writes about her Birthright trip. These Jewish women unabashedly share and confess their hopes, desires, frustrations, and tribulations in Yiddish, English and Hebrew.
It is appropriate that the exhibit opened shortly before Rosh Hashanah because of its theme of confessions. “I’ve always had a soft spot for confession,” Corinne Pearlman writes in her comic Show and Tell. “A range of things to feel guilty about is like Manna to my soul,” she continues. Above her comics is a small square panel of a girl in tears, crying “In fact m-my parents are assimilated.” No secrets are too embarrassing for these artists to directly tell. As Racheli Rotner writes about the process of creating a graphic novel, “I wasn’t circling the subject anymore—I was telling it.”
In small boxes, ideas are juxtaposed ungracefully. Rotner compares waiting for Moshiach to waiting for a man to come and deliver her. He never shows up. In the modern world we live in, where salvation is hard to imagine, and Judaism is often hard to connect to or picture, these woman turn the Bible on its heels. One uses the command for men not to wear women’s clothing and juxtaposes it with men dressed in drag. In Vanessa Davis’s Toys in Babeland, a Chassidic man eavesdrops on two girls purchasing vibrators in a sex shop. The ideas addressed in the comics feel realistic, relatable, and modern.
“Besides, normal people don’t care about comic books,” one character tells another in Diane Noomin’s comic. And yet, Graphic Details proves that “normal people” can and do care about comic books. “I guess she’s just expressing her individuality,” Lauren Weinstein writes in her comic Last Dance about showing up at her prom in fish net stockings with razor blade runs. And that is in fact what these women are doing: they are expressing their individuality as Jewish women unashamed to portray their bodies or their emotions, asking the viewer to care about their personal experiences.
Prophecy of Place similarly discloses heavy emotions about Judaism, although on a national level as opposed to a personal one. The opening wall text discusses the concept of Shevirah, or “cosmic breaking.” The solo exhibit of Quintan Ana Wikswo depicts the crusades, Spanish inquisition, pogroms, and the Holocaust in a broken fashion, using typewriters and modified cameras produced by prisoners in Nazi Germany and Franco’s Spain. The triptychs and video installations of these places in modern times, viewed through a lens of the past, create blurred and foggy images that seem to be almost filled with ghosts of the dead.
In the middle of the exhibition sits a table with a typewriter surrounded by stones. Much of the poetry Wikso has written is included in loose scraps on the table, weighed down by stones. The viewer is invited to also write whatever he chooses and place it underneath the rocks.
Jews on Vinyl also encourages the viewer to interact with the art. The exhibit is wildly colorful, with a large display of record covers of music that Jews have composed or been a part of. The room consists of multiple small listening stations with coaches and headphones which allow the viewer to sit and listen to the music and other sounds created by mid-twentieth century Jews. Although a lovely musical exploration, the exhibit doesn’t provide the same emotional impact that the other two exhibitions do. While the other exhibitions speak of national and personal tragedy, this exhibition allows for a better understanding of Jewish music and assimilated American Jews of the past century.
To close the opening, Dr. Wisse, an art history professor and director of the YU Museum, spoke about how the YU Museum is dedicated to the preservation of Jewish art and culture. He believes that the role of the Jewish museum is to look at contemporary art and culture in interesting and different ways. Wikso also addressed the gathering of students and reporters, talking about how her project started as a personal pilgrimage but became much larger. She talked about how she had taken evil cameras and made something beautiful out of something horrific and ugly. Sarah Lightman, an artist and curator of the Graphic Details exhibition, discussed the female voice in Jewish literature and talked about bringing that voice into the exhibition.
As Wikso wrote in one of her videos, “This is our hour. There is no magic for women.” And yet, nearly half a century after the Holocaust, women are magical. They are singers and performers, graphic novelists and soldiers. All three exhibitions are about making the ugly into the beautiful, transforming negative emotions into song, and moving beyond national and personal tragedy to reinvent and recreate, opportune messages for this time of year.