This exhibition by Anita Rabinoff-Goldman is a stunning artistic interpretation of a verse from each of the Torah's 54 portions.

Seeing Torah is a visual diary documenting my study and artistic response to each of the 54 portions of the Torah over the cycle of a single Jewish year. It is my hope that by adding my voice to the long-running conversation that is the reading and interpretation of Torah, viewers will encounter the text in fresh ways and deepen and broaden their own explorations of it. In this way, the work is a visual midrash in the tradition of Jewish creative commentary--imaginative re-envisionings that both enhance and illuminate the text for all who seek to be refreshed by it. The voice I bring to this project is that of a woman, a wife, a mother, and a grandmother. I look for often overlooked women in the text because we were surely a part of the story even if we were often nameless. I look for ways in which our historic leaders might inform today’s political climate. I look for the reasons someone might have behaved in a particular way towards another and consider how it applies to our own relationships. Seeing Torah is infused with a desire to present the heart and spiritual weight of the stories we continue to read and value. Quilts are my canvas, fabrics my paint. While visual imagery may be transferable between media, the added tactile dimension of the quilt, along with the emotional dimension that fabric carries with it, makes quilt-making a particularly potent expressive force for me. My goal with this project is to create a compilation of Torah stories by means of both visual and tactile images that, together, illuminate those sections of text that especially resonate for me. One way we understand our world is through stories; another is through art. 

Anita Rabinoff-Goldman