Art Gallery

Calligraphy by Jerise Fogel

Celebrating Calligraphy
featuring Jerise Fogel

January 24 Shabbat Shmooze with Jerise Fogel and Tani Cohen-Fraade

As a Jewish community, we love texts. And as a Jewish community, we adorn the things we love. Calligraphy in its most creative and expressive forms combines text and adornment, enticing the viewer to contemplate meaning and visual pleasure.

Our newly renovated sanctuary features original calligraphy designed by Jerise Fogel for the BEKI community. The glowing metal letters affixed next to the ark were fabricated from her hand-drawn Hebrew lettering. They quote the well-known verse from Psalms: Hiney mah tov u-mah na’im shevet achim gam yachad. The words are strictly translated as How good and pleasant it is when siblings dwell together and more loosely translated as Behold how good and pleasant it is when we come together as one. Our congregational committees chose the words for our ark. Jerise made them shine in designing calligraphic forms for the texts.

In this exhibition we see the breadth of Jerise Fogel’s creative intertwining of expressive text and image. Her visions flow in works formed from brushwork, or paper cuts, or expressive color, or even combinations of techniques and materials. Jerise Fogel is also a paper-cut artist, and a professor of Classics and Humanities at Montclair State University. Jerise has studied calligraphy since high school, and believes in illuminating meaningful language with artistic design.

Tani Cohen-Fraade, a BEKI member and community leader, contributed a number of his works to the exhibition as well.

In addition to many works by Jerise Fogel and Tani Cohen-Fraade, the exhibition includes works by Karen Kassap, Sivia Katz, Patty H. Davis, Sharon Binder, Daryl Rotman Kuperstock, Steven Fraade and Ellen Cohen, Cynthia Beth Rubin, and more, supplemented with works from the BEKI collection, the Bell/Sotsky collection, the Harriet Friedman collection, and others.

Selected works are available for purchase. Contact art@beki.org

To see more work by Jerise Fogel visit:
https://www.instagram.com/jerise_papercut
https://sandbox.jerise.com

Calligraphy by Tani Cohen-Fraade