Arts Blog

By Jenni Person, Artistic Director, The Open Tent

During last Passover 2009, Arts Inside The Open Tent presented an alternative, creative Passover Seder as Art, promoting alternative access to the Passover experience. In conjunction with its exhibition, Growing Up Comix: JT Waldman, in partnership with Art Center/South Florida, the Seder As Art tied-in the graphic novelist’s piece Four Children, originally commissioned by Nextbook, while engaging artists in a variety of media (performing, media and visual arts) with their own interpretations of parts of the Haggadah. Participating artists were Kevin Arrow Andrea Askowitz, Hannah Lasky, Zammy Migdal, Rhonda Mitrani, Carmel Ophir & Howard Davis, and JT Waldman.

Seder As Art stood out as a successful interdisciplinary art experience not only because it relied on the intermix of a variety of disciplines, but also because of its play between art and audience – an experiential reinterpretation of tradition. The project served as a virtual aesthetic Seder which took guests (otherwise known as on Second Saturday gallery night art enthusiasts prowling the Design District’s offerings) through aspects of the traditional Passover Seder from the memory and nostalgia referenced in a mixed-media installation, My Matzo by Zammy Migdal to through a literal figurative print of a halo-ed Elijah by Hannah Lasky. Like an actual Seder, the project prodded and struck deep to provoke questions and stirred guests to examine contemporary issues in the face of the historical story of the journey from the narrow place of oppression to redemption.

In addition to Waldman’s piece, the project included Four Questions, a video installation by Rhonda Mitrani that juxtaposed text, sound, and video footage to question if the contemporary condition of media image bombardment numbs us to the fact that the same issues of oppression still exist.

Kevin Arrow’s Untitled (Recipe Box) was to the naked eye purely nostalgia as an installation of a wooden recipe box out of which he pulled and arranged mostly handwritten recipes for standard Ashkenazi Jewish recipes such as stuffed cabbage, matzah brei and brisket. His artist statement connected it to memories of his grandmother’s cooking and stories of another life in an Odessa shtetl surviving Cossack rampages. The very image of the balabusta, a Yiddish term of endearment and praise for a skilled Jewish homemaker (the literal translation is “master of the house”), in the kitchen of Arrow’s more upwardly mobile American childhood ably and abundantly providing for two generations of family served as a strong symbol of redemption. As the producer of this project I was fortunate to also hear another story of redemption. Arrow spoke of his acquisition of the box, discovered amongst a gutter full of discards. As he perused the refuse he came across hand-notated books and such treasures that it seemed someone else perceived of as trash. Thankfully Arrow redeemed some books, including cookbooks and the recipe box from annihilation giving it a new life amongst his own palette and in our installation.