“I’ve been making art ever since I can remember. It’s the only thing I took in elementary, middle, and high school. We could always pick topics like dance, but I always picked art. When I went to college, I didn’t know what I wanted to study. Back then, we had course books, so we got the book with all the classes. The first classes I picked were a drawing class and a painting class. You know, I was thinking, ‘Oh, maybe I’ll do pre-med, maybe I’ll do political science,’ and I took all these other classes, but I just kept circling back to taking more art classes. I ended up majoring in fine arts. I attended graduate school and earned my MFA in painting. I just kept doing more art. I started teaching. I was a TA when I was an undergrad for printmaking, and then when I was in grad school, I was a TA for drawing, and so then when I graduated from grad school right away I started teaching art, and I’ve always felt like it’s such an easy transition between the work that I do in my studio and you know talking about it. What I love about teaching art is that it forces me to verbally say things that I’m thinking about and that I’m doing in my own art practice, but it’s not verbal, so I don’t really think about it. When I’m in front of students and I’m trying to explain, it kind of forces me to think about it verbally.
I’m constantly sketching, even when I’m teaching. Typically, I work on something for a few years. For example, this [Topography of Wonder] was a series, I think in the end there were 10 of them, more abstract and really large-scale watercolors, and they were all based on memories of places. So each one kind of originated in a specific place that I had either lived in or grown up in. And then this group of works [Even Now], which also took a few years, was based on memories that were passed down to me by family members. So kind of inherited memories. And so, yes, usually I have some sort of larger thing that I’m thinking about. Typically, it’s connected to me, my identity, like where I’m from, the places where I’ve lived, my family history. But my work is very organic and intuitive, and I never know what it’s going to look like or how big it’s going to get until it’s done. So I really don’t know what I’m doing until I’m doing it, if that makes sense. I never plan anything. I don’t sketch and then make work. I usually sketch from the work or just sketch, you know, without planning anything. I just keep working.
I was born in Israel. My dad is from Argentina, and my mom is from Israel. I grew up in Mexico City, and then I finished high school in Costa Rica. I came to the States for college. So both my family members are from different places, and I grew up in different places. And I spoke at home. We spoke Hebrew and Spanish, and I learned English at school. And so always being from a different place and not from the place where I was living was kind of part of, you know, my identity. I always felt like I never really fit in anywhere when I was growing up because I was never just from one place.
I’ve been making art for a really long time, and it’s this idea of identity of place, where am I really from, what does that mean, all these complex, contradictory parts. That’s what I’m embracing through the work, and it’s almost like I’m thinking through the work about all this stuff. But with this latest work that ended up being this really, really large watercolor on paper that’s 30 feet long and 8 feet tall, it’s about memories that were passed down to me from my mom’s side of the family. So my mom, both of her parents were Holocaust survivors and the rest of the family perished in the Holocaust and so there’s all those stories and then on my dad’s side of the family he was in Argentina during the dictatorship during the dirty war in the 60s and 70s and so from both sides of my family I have this history of people fleeing places or genocide or totalitarian authoritarian governments. And so a lot of the stories from both sides of my family are about persevering, continuity, trying to continue to live even though you’re experiencing a really harsh political reality. And so that’s part of it too.”
