As a Jewish woman born at the height of the Holocaust, since early childhood, I’ve understood myself as being charged with remembering and in some way embodying the millions of Jewish children who were never born because their parents were murdered or were born but couldn’t survive. This responsibility and its intersection with antisemitism, misogyny, and marginalizing definitions of Jewish girlhood and motherhood have driven my work. My art is not a commodity, it is an extension of my life—the thoughts and questions I’ve had, the skills I’ve developed, the challenges and tasks I’ve been given—a way to make meaning of the world I live in and the manner in which I’ve lived.

I have been a multimedia conceptual artist for over thirty years devoted to the shamanic power of art to make the invisible visible. Informed by mystical traditions such as Kabbalah and Taoism, my practice combines exploration and documentation in service to the recovery of shattered identity, collective memory, and energetic reconnection in the wake of genocide. After 10 years on the undergraduate and graduate faculty of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts (Boston), I left teaching in 2002 to devote myself to my studio practice.

In my work, I’ve combined traditionally industrial, masculine materials such as copper wire with traditionally domestic, feminine craft forms such as knitting and crocheting. I shot video to capture rapidly disappearing traces of pre- and post-Holocaust worlds in Poland and Ukraine while traveling in Eastern Europe shortly after the Berlin Wall came down. Other works include mixed media sculptures, drawings, and extensive writings.