Here we go!

The Milwaukee Jewish Artists’ Lab

The Harry & Rose Samson Jewish Community Center, Milwaukee, along with the Sabes JCC, Minneapolis, and University of Wisconsin Hillel, Madison, Wisconsin, are addressing the need to broaden the impact of the arts in helping Jewish artists as well as Jews in the regional Jewish Community at large to find meaning, community, identity and spirituality through the arts. For many Jews, the traditional approaches to Jewish life are no longer meaningful, and the arts can serve as a common denominator among Jews regardless of their degree of belief, cultural literacy or religious affiliation. In addition, as a result of the current economic climate, there is an increasing need for institutions like ours to form partnerships across geographical and institutional lines. During the 2011/2012 program year, this project will unfold in Milwaukee alone, and will expand to Madison and Minneapolis in the following years.

The Regional Artists’ Laboratory seeks to enrich two populations in our region: artists who may or may not already be drawn to art as an expression of their Jewish identity, and the Jewish public at large. We seek to create two interrelated programs: 1) An Artists’ Laboratory in which artists will combine the study of Jewish texts, both the traditional and the non-traditional, with their own creation of works of art that intersect with those texts, and 2) An Artists-in-Residence program for emerging artists which will interact with both the Laboratory and the Jewish Community at large. Both of these aspects of the program would connect with an annual exhibit/showcase for the artists’ work. In all cases, we seek artists in the broadest sense of the word: visual, theatrical, musical, textural, literary, etc.