"It's beautiful. It's brilliant. We'll never show it." Such was the response California artist Beth Grossman received when presenting her latest body of work to Jewish museums and galleries across the United States. With the exception of the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco, all of the institutions she contacted rejected her work, at times questioning its Jewishness.
Grossman chose to remember Mary as a Jewish woman, through the gesture of her hands, through the trace of her actions. Our Mother Mary Found remembers a loss, the death of an identity, but also celebrates the beauty and brilliance of a Jewish mother, Miriam, daughter of Zion.

Beth Grossman weaves motherhood, history into her work:
" I still had another masterpiece to complete before I could become a mom, " she said. "As it turned out, my experience as a mother has informed and inspired my artwork immensely. I now feel I would have missed a large part of the picture."

Five Bay Area conservationists are thinking globally – but outside the mainstream consensus – about sustainability.

Beth Grossman: Brisbane Baylands

" The former San Francisco dump, off Highway 101 in Brisbane, is now called "the Baylands" by developers who plan to cap the landfill and create yet another shopping mall hosting "big box" stores. I see a great opportunity to transform these 550 acres of toxic land into an "eco-park center." Environmental research and development labs and an indoor-outdoor environmental museum and conference center would be a destination for international scientists, environmentalists, policy makers, artists, journalists, and students of all ages."

" Indeed, there are dozens of personal tales, providing an almost voyeuristic opportunity to eavesdrop. In ''Views,'' with shutter slats used as a grid for her text, Beth Grossman tells two stories. On the inside, her first-person narrative is honest, private and unguarded. To the outside world, ''Everything is just fine.''"

Artist Beth Grossman has taken the idea of exploring biblical texts into a new
direction; her work is about recontextualizing history and mythology--creating art
that can turn assumptions upside down. While studying art in Italy, she found
herself surrounded by images of an idealized, iconic Mary--the virgin mother. That
experience, along with her interest in interfaith dialogue, inspired Grossman to
explore the Jewish roots of this Christian icon. Grossman chose to revisit Mary's
story and create art that portrays her as an unidealized, very human Jewish woman.

When her Mary works have been exhibited, she has invited both Jewish and Christian
groups to view and discuss the meaning of her artwork. As an artist, she is
interested in finding common threads among groups; in this case, she feels it is
significant for both Jews and Christians to remember that Mary, Joseph, and Jesus
were known, historically, to be Jewish.

Artist underscores Jewish connections in life of Jesus’ mother
With the 10-piece exhibit, Grossman seeks to reclaim Mary, the venerated mother of Jesus, as the Jewish woman she was. Each piece is an antique wooden object adorned with gold leaf inscriptions of Jewish prayers (in Hebrew, English and Italian). She also painstakingly painted in gold leaf on each object the hands of Mary as represented in classic Renaissance and Baroque paintings.
The objects, which also include a sieve, tray, plane and washboard, were collected in Italy during a year Grossman and her husband spent in Milan. While there, the artist filled her days studying the great Italian masters, in particular their representations of the ubiquitous Virgin Mary. “I was seduced by how beautiful they were,” says the Brisbane-based artist. “How do I relate to this story as an artist and a Jew?”
“ This story has had a big impact on our history,” she says. “It’s the iconic story of Western civilization. But she was an ordinary Jewish mother.”

“I wanted to give each woman a sense that her story was crucial to making up the history we were creating. And we do create [history] as Jewish women in the world. I got a really clear picture of the role women in the former Soviet Union are playing in creating a civil society there,” she said. “And if they don’t write their own stories, their own history, no one else is going to.”

“Grossman bases her work on her personal experience as a married, middle class artist and mother, celebrating her coming of age during the feminist movement of the 1970’s. The relationships between men and women are key. In “First Comes Love” She begins with ordinary domestic objects, which she chooses for their shape, function or cultural symbolism. Her works offer many layers of understanding with a humorous undergirding.”

“Artists have founded a bi-monthly salon, held art sharing evenings and will now be working with a City Council subcommittee on how to nurture this community.”

[Lifestyles magazine] (355kb)
International Edition

Brisbane artist Beth Grossman’s new series of work, “First Comes Love,” makes its debut Monday at the Belmont Arts Council Gallery in the Twin Pines Art Center. Using found objects which she imbues with stories and history, Grossman probes the myth of the middle-class American Dream.

"California artist Beth Grossman contributes to this important realm of American-Jewish history with "Passages an Immigrant's Story," an exhibition of her work on display at Philadelphia's National Museum of American Jewish History."

"These and many other immigrant stories unfold around a series of seven doors painted by California artist, Beth Grossman.......Like the doors and suitcases, memorabilia and heirlooms immigrants bring from their homeland -- or keep of their journey to the United states -- tell their family history."

Photo feature of 'G' is for Giving in wood, by Beth Grossman

"Some view doors as and entrance, others as an exit, but one artist sees doors as a means of telling and preserving her family's history for future generations....There are so many different versions of family history and the more of us that write it down, the more voices we will have to tell it."

"Six women artist are currently presenting a novel exhibit at the Ellis Island Immigration Museum focusing on the Jewish experience in the Goldene Medina (the "Golden Land"). Ellis Island, the refurbished landmark in New York harbor that witnessed the arrival of hundreds of thousands of immigrants to the United States, is host to the sculptures, paintings, photographs and sounds that offer a glimpse into that experience, one that is so much a part of American-Jewish history,"

"In the stark and sterile dormitory rooms on Ellis Island, immigrants slept fitfully on flimsy cots waiting to begin their new lives in Di Goldene Medina. Almost a century later, the ghosts of immigrants inhabit these rooms of peeling radiators and chipped tile floors. Only now they must share their space with a group of Jewish women artists who, like Virginia Woolf, know what it means to transform a room into their own."