Sculpture

Content type
Collection

Louise Nevelson stamps issued by US Postal Service

April 6, 2000

On April 6, 2000, the United States Postal Service issued five stamps honoring and depicting the work of sculptor Louise Nevelson.

Louise Nevelson

Louise Nevelson belongs to a generation of Manhattan-based painters and sculptors whose careers coincided with the development of modernism in America. Nevelson created sculptures that audiences could both experience and see. Several of her pieces are now owned by the Whitney, the Brooklyn Museum, and MOMA.

Teresa Żarnower (Żarnoweröwna)

One of the most important artistic personalities of the Polish constructivist avant-garde in the 1920s, Teresa Żarnower founded the first Polish constructivist artistic group, “Blok,” and also edited the magazine of the same title. While pioneering the field of avant-garde art, she was also actively involved in left-wing politics, designing election posters and two-party leaflets.

Hannah Wilke

The body is omnipresent in the work of artist Hannah Wilke. The nude body and its self-representation became the vehicle by which Wilke exposed personal, political, and linguistic themes. Her work continues to influence the complex art of postmodern artists today.

Miriam Schapiro

Miriam Schapiro helped pioneer the feminist art movement, both through her own pushing of creative boundaries and by creating opportunities for other women artists. Starting in 1970, Schapiro raised women’s consciousness through her writing, painting, printmaking, teaching and sculpture. She lectured extensively on feminist issues to professional conferences, university audiences, art classes and women’s groups.

Antonietta Raphaël

Painting and sculptor Antonietta Raphaël rose to fame in the 1950s. Her paintings were seen for the first time in Rome in 1929; during World War II, she took up sculpting, and in the 1950s, she rose to prominence and exhibited her works worldwide.

Virginia Morris Pollak

During World War II, sculptor Virginia Morris Pollak used her deep understanding of clay, plaster, and metal to revolutionize reconstructive surgery for wounded servicemen. This earned her a presidential citation, and she was later appointed to JFK’s Commission for the Employment of the Handicapped. Pollak also co-founded her own sculpture studio and chaired the Norfolk Fine Arts Commission, beautifying her hometown with an outdoor sculpture museum at the Botanic Garden.

Chana Orloff

Sculptor Chana Orloff was a part of the avant-garde circle of Montparnasse, the international movement of artists in Paris. After immigrating to Paris from Palestine in 1910, Orloff became the unofficial portraitist of the Parisian elite, creating over three hundred portraits. Orloff’s sculpture figures are now in collections throughout Israel, Europe, and the United States.

Isadora Newman

Isadora Newman was a celebrated writer, storyteller, poet, and artist. Born in New Orleans, her stories often focused on Creole and Black life and legend and folktales from foreign countries. Her books were translated into many languages and she later became an accomplished painter and sculptor.

Gertrud Amon Natzler

Gertrud Amon Natzler’s collaboration with her husband, Otto Natzler, over almost four decades produced some of the twentieth century’s finest ceramics. Their nearly 25,000 pieces now reside in 70 museums and countless private collections worldwide.

Charlotte Lipsky

Charlotte Schacht Lipsky found an unusual balance between activism and pragmatism: on one hand, a follower of the revolutionary Emma Goldman, on the other, the owner of a successful interior decorating business. In her later years, she was involved in Hadassah and the Women’s American ORT, an organization that taught trade skills to Jews around the world.

Batia Lichansky

Batia Lichansky, Israel’s first woman sculptor, famously expressed the pioneer Zionist spirit during the formative years of the State of Israel through her portrait sculptures, reliefs, and memorials sculpted in stone, wood, and bronze. After studying across Europe, Lichansky became a prominent Israeli artist and won the Tel Aviv-Jaffa Dizengoff Prize twice, in 1944 and 1957.

Gertrud Kraus

Gertrud Kraus was a pioneer dancer and choreographer, mainly in expressionist dance. Her career began in Vienna during the 1920s, but she performed her solo and group recitals throughout Central Europe and soon became a prominent modern dance artist. In 1935, at the peak of her European career, she immigrated to Palestine and her extensive and innovative work made her the leading figure of modern, expressionist dance in Israel.

Joyce Kozloff

Joyce Kozloff is an internationally recognized painter, public muralist, and feminist whose long-term passions have been history, culture, and the decorative and popular arts. One of the founders of the pattern and decoration movement, Kozloff is dedicated to creating her own work and giving the folk art of women of color a voice. Kozloff is known as one of America’s more original and engaging artists.

Rose Kohler

Rose Kohler was a multitalented woman who was known as an accomplished painter and sculptor. She was a teacher in, and later the chair of, the National Council of Jewish Women’s religious schools in Cincinnati, Ohio, and wrote many articles on art and religion.

Elena Kabischer-Jakerson

Elena Kabischer was a talented graphic artist, painter, and sculptor in the early twentieth century. She captured the Jewish shtetls under Soviet rule in her paintings, using a Cézannist grasp of form and perception of color.

Eva Hesse

Eva Hesse created innovative sculptural forms using unconventional materials such as latex and fiberglass and gave minimal art organic, emotional, and kinetic features. She scorned the decorative, creating sculptures out of repeated units which embodied opposite extremes. Her large fiberglass and latex works are recognized as major works of the 1960s artistic era.

Gertrude/Gego Goldschmidt

Gego, born Gertrude Goldschmidt, was one of Venezuela’s most creative and ingenious artists. Her sculptures have not only a sense of closure but also a boundlessness erasing any distance between viewer and artist and insisting on generating new perspectives.

Temima Gezari

Artist and innovator Temima Gezari made a lasting impact on Jewish education through her vivid artwork, illustrations of children’s books, and many years of teaching. Her philosophy of using art to teach about Jewish holidays and customs left an indelible mark on countless schoolchildren. After more than 60years in the field, she was a legendary presence in Jewish education.

Mary Frank

Mary Frank was a sculptor and painter inspired by dance, photography, and the moving body. Born in London, Frank immigrated to the United States in the 1940s and danced with Martha Graham and studied art at the American Art School in New York. Frank imparts a sense of the timelessness and her work, and her sculptures have been described as sensual, sublime, poetic and profoundly moving, placing her among the foremost figurative artists of our time. 

Katherine M. Cohen

Katherine M. Cohen was a sculptor and artist dedicated to advocating for equality for women in the arts. Comfortably situated in the community of Philadelphia’s Jewish elite, Cohen created many commissions for the community reflecting Jewish themes and illustrated a Jewish children’s book. Cohen made a speech at the Chicago World’s Fair advocating for the support of artists, and specifically female artists.

Judy Chicago

Judy Chicago is one of the most internationally recognized contemporary artists in the United States. Early in the 1970s women’s movement, Chicago consciously sought to explore what it means to be both a woman and an artist. She is best known for her large, multi-media projects such as The Dinner Party, The Birth Project, The Holocaust Project: From Darkness into Light, and Resolutions: A Stitch in Time.

Austria: Jewish Women Artists

Most Jewish women artists from Austria have been forgotten due to the male domination of the Austrian art sphere and the Holocaust. However, many Jewish female artists in Austria created influential work and established their own system of education and their own organizations, leading to a flourishing female art world until 1938.

Artists: Yishuv and Israel: 1920-1970

 While women are often excluded from the historical narrative of Israeli art-making, women artists made significant contributions to the canon of Israeli art throughout the twentieth century. Depicting landscapes, creating ceramics, and painting beautiful portraits, many female artists made significant contributions to the development of the Bezalel Art school and Israeli modern art. In 1952, the artistic Group of Ten was founded, to use a modern language in order to express the Israeli experience and landscape. 

Artists: Israeli, 1970 to 2000

The inclusion of feminism in Israeli art was seen as irrelevant in the 1970s, when Israel was seen as a state of gender equality. But in the following decades, amid vast changes in Israeli society, women worked hard to make themselves seen and have their stories told in the wider world of Israeli art.

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