Lail Stockfish / Roundup
The newly renovated Pierce College Art Gallery re-opened March 8, with an exhibit that takes on an issue within the global radar since the creation of Israel in 1948.
While, United States Vice President Joe Biden found himself in the heat of the Middle East conflict, on a peace trip to Israel gone awry, Pierce show cases an attempt to move beyond and break barriers surrounding Arab-Israeli relations.
The 14 out of 25 pieces of Sharon Siskin’s “Children of Abraham” displayed in the small white-walled gallery on Art Hill, highlights the similarities rather than the differences of the two cultures responsible for decades of war.
Siskin was born in Philadelphia during the late 1950’s. With Jewish grandparents who left Poland, she is no stranger to the segregation that marked the years after WWII. During a phone interview she recalls a Strong memory of a swimming club, “I asked my mother why we couldn’t go there, and she said “oh, they don’t let us in.”
Even so, she describes herself as a “Cultural Jew” and is not biased towards Israel. When it comes to prejudice, Siskin is intolerant. “Children of Abraham” is a testament to her beliefs.
Siskin calls it “sort of [her] prayer for healing.” She said, “The situation in Israel and Palestine really, really, breaks my heart.” This is “a repair from a feminist standpoint” that uses sewing and binding with various materials to merge Arabic and Hebrew Children’s learning Books together to create one.
She describes finding a stack of old children’s books in Arabic at the San Francisco Dump when she was part of the artist residency program there. And later, when old books from Yiddish and Hebrew school her mother sent her, arrived in the mail the idea came together. “The illustrations were familiar, and resembled one another so much.”
Side by side they show “everyone thinking the same, wanting their kids to learn to read and write and have core values.”
The piece entitled “dream.” The four colorful pages of rockets, stars and space meticulously bound together with three zippers, thread and tape that Siskin feels really emulates this. “In the 1960’s there was this real focus on getting a man on the moon and the Arab and Jews were seeing the same thing, dreaming the same thing”
Pierce is the Exhibit’s first stop after its premier opening in Seattle, Washington.
Instructor of Arts Monika Del Bosque contacted Siskin hoping to have it at Pierce. She said, “If I can bring in art that helps foster a dialogue,that would be great.”
Although she is backed by an extensive resume, numerous awards and cross country exhibits, Siskin share’s the same sentiment.
She prefers to show in educational settings conducive to discussions and was further persuaded by the cultural diversity amongst Pierce faculty and students.
She hasn’t been disappointed.
On March 11, Siskin spoke in the overflowing Great Lecture Hall. “I told the audience to call out at any point if they had something to say, and they did. I really liked that.”
During the reception that followed, Nabil Abu-Ghazaleh, vice-president of academic affairs at Pierce, who is Palastenian and can read Arabic, was able to give Siskin a little more insight on her artwork. .
“He gave me detailed translations of the books and some of them he’d preface by saying ‘I feel uncomfortable with this one’ and after he read them I really didn’t feel comfortable with them either. One in the small print said something like, ‘and therefore men should always act like men and woman should always act like woman and never act like men.'”
“I’m a visual artist, so the images meant more to me than the text,” says Siskin. “Illustration showing…different people but raise kids with the same core values, same structure,” is what she focused on.
Although she had the text translated after completing the project, they weren’t as detailed as Abu-Ghazaleh’s.
Regardless, the statement is clear, Arabs and Jews, both who consider themselves to be descendants of Abraham, are “two people that have a lot in common.”
Siskin hopes to show the exhibit in various Jewish and Muslim venues that can ultimately spark a much needed dialogue between and within the two cultures.
In the meantime, as the world will watch Biden and Senator Hillary Clinton try to address it on the global scale, “Children of Abraham” will remain at Pierce until April 15th.
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