Now On View

Due to the Coronavirus pandemic Hillel will be closed through the Spring Quarter. All our programs and art

exhibits are cancelled. Thank you for your support and interest in the Dortort Center

Susan Cooper

Story Line: My Family's History 

Art serves as a compass to determine and explore our place in the world. It is a fulcrum, linking the physical world with ideas, memory and vision. I have the honor of constantly reflecting a continually changing, perplexing, and marvelous world that we all occupy.

The studio work is a personal view. I strive to visually connect conceptual views to history and to nature. I often combine two and three dimensions. Two-dimensional images create illusions of depth, while three-dimensional art is typically object oriented. Combining the two affords the opportunity to build illusion out of objects and objects out of painting, thereby creating a paradox. This contradiction of dimension mimics our imaginations, perceptions feelings and daily lives. The studio work often addresses life cycles, changes in time and place, and the nature of art itself.

Los Angeles is my original home. My art education was in painting at the University of California, Berkeley, where I earned BA and MA degrees. After two years in New Mexico, I moved just outside of Denver where a former barn is my studio.

Susan Cooper

“Story Line” is a joy to read, partially because the information is so specific. Partially, too, because the imagery is done with such care and feeling. The booklet-like catalog that identifies buildings that figure into your family history was a brilliant idea. What you wrote about each site makes an engaging story.

                                                                                                 Jim Melchert, artist, Professor Emeritus at University of California, Berkeley
                                                                                                 Former head of Visual Arts, National Endowment of the Arts
                                                                                                 Former Director of National Academy in Rome

To hear more about our recent Art Opening with Susan Cooper, Click here

    

This exhibition will run through March 20, 2020

Mary Leipziger

India through a Jewish Lens

"The photographs show people in their spaces, already, but with the assurances that realism always illustrates what you haven’t seen yet, the connections, colors, the geometries suggested by human form and direction, the hidden hand, usually demeaning, and not signifying like a subject engaged and exposed, and both the photographer and the subject fully enjoying the surprise of human contact."

     

     

Mary Leipziger is a Los Angeles based Canadian Jewish photographer whose photographs have been published in the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, the Philadelphia Enquirer, Dallas Times Herald, National Museum of American Jewish History and many other publications.

Ms. Leipziger holds an M.A. from California State University, Northridge, CA, a B.A. in Architecture from the Southern California Institute of Architecture Los Angeles, CA and a B.F.A. from Boston University in Boston, Mass.

Click here for an interview with Mary Leipziger & The Daily Bruin

This exhibit runs until June 15, 2020

Hillel Smith

Parsha Posters


Begun at Simchat Torah 2015, the Parsha Poster project is a series of posters "advertising" the parshat hashavua (weekly Torah portion). The posters utilize innovative Hebrew typography--each one integrates the Hebrew name of the parsha in Hebrew somehow into the illustration--and a bold, graphic aesthetic to tell Biblical stories in a new way. 

Hillel Smith is an artist and graphic designer focusing on engaging communities with their heritage in innovative ways. He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a degree in Visual Studies. Finding a lack of inspiring new Jewish art, he attempts to re-imagine the potential of Judaica by utilizing contemporary media like spray paint and digital graphics to create new manifestations of traditional forms. He has painted dynamic Jewish murals in Southern California and Israel with his Hebrew street art venture Illuminated Streets, with more murals on the way. He revitalizes ancient rituals with online projects like his GIF Omer Counter and Parsha Poster series, encouraging creative reconsideration of religious practice. He leads workshops on Jewish art, including Jewish street art, at a growing number of institutions, centering on artistic empowerment, continuity, and manifesting identity through the arts. Seeing Hebrew as the visual glue binding Jews together across time and space, he also teaches Jewish typographic history, using print as a lens for Jewish life and culture. Making fun and engaging content is also the crux of his work as a designer of educational products, viral videos, and marketing materials for organizations large and small, as for clients like Patton Oswalt. See his work at hillelsmith.info. 

Will be on view in the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf (1st Floor)

New Cuts 

by Corrie Siegel

“Wherever the relevance of speech is at stake, matters become political by definition,
for speech is what makes man a political being” - Hannah Arendt

New Cuts is an exhibition of flat and sculptural works created from single sheets of paper. Alternately delicate and spiked, the works are formed by overlaid matrixes of texts that are incised to obscure the original message and reveal a pattern composed of symbols.  Each piece is built from statements made during the rise of the Third Reich or the Trump Administration. Through the form of a traditional paper-cut; these loaded texts are abstracted into jagged landscapes and fragile lace.

Corrie Siegel is a Los Angeles based multimedia artist who has exhibited nationally and internationally. Mining individual and collective histories, she uses labor intensive approaches to occupy a position between objectivity and interpretation. Her projects have been profiled in the Los Angeles Times, Mousse Magazine, Droste Effect, and Flash Art International.  Siegel is currently an Armory Fellow, she was also awarded a Word Grant, Dream Lab Fellowship, Culture Lab Fellowship, and Six Points Fellowship. She is the director of the artist run gallery and community space Actual Size Los Angeles. Actual Size collaborates with established and emerging artists to animate the exhibition experience and engage the public.  She received her BFA from Bard College and is currently pursuing an MFA with a concentration in Curatorial and Critical Studies from University of California, Irvine.