Artists hearing the High Holidays

In Madison, Wisconsin, the week-long conference Practicing Jews: Art, Identity, and Culture brought academics, artists and community members into a sustained conversation about Jewish visual culture and artistic life. Talks and keynote presentations linked scholarly questions to gallery encounters, while performances and discussions showed how creative practice can hold sacred memory, belonging and disagreement at once.

A guiding question was how the conference’s artists respond to the liturgy of the High Holidays. The most revealing answers avoided treating ritual as a decorative theme. Instead, the artists used recurring prayers, communal sounds, gestures, silences and sacred objects as structures from which to compose. The result was an inquiry into how observance changes time, attention and the body.

Liturgy as an artistic grammar

The High Holidays offer a pattern rather than a single image. Their calendar unfolds through anticipation, recollection, confession and release. Prayers return to the same themes, while variations in voice, pitch and pace create subtle differences. For artists, this repetition offered a model for exploring memory: an image may recur, but each appearance carries the residue of everything that happened between it and its return.

Several conference discussions concerned the productive use of interruption. The pauses of Yom Kippur, the blast of the shofar and the movement between readings can become formal devices. A work might introduce a sound that repeatedly breaks its visual rhythm, or leave an area of emptiness where a listener expects an event. Such choices translate worship into experiences based on concentration and release.

This approach also shifted attention away from realistic scenes of a synagogue. The gallery becomes a space for examining ritual’s underlying architecture. Viewers encounter duration, sequence and bodily discipline, but they do not need to share the beliefs that produced the work. The artistic encounter can therefore remain open while still respecting the sacred source.

Voice, gesture and embodied practice

Dance and movement gave the conference a particularly vivid way to discuss liturgical form. Swaying during prayer, bowing, standing, processing and turning toward the Torah are physical acts with shared meanings. Artists working in dance can draw on these gestures without reproducing them literally. Movement can reveal how a congregation coordinates many bodies, how uncertainty enters a ritual, or how individual devotion sits beside collective action.

Voice was equally important. Cantillation, chanting, silence and the shofar are not background effects but active forms of participation. They create communal listening, mark transitions and give shape to time. When sound becomes material for an artist, the emphasis moves from what is being said to how saying itself works: the breath, the held note, the uneven response of a group.

The embodied dimension also sharpened questions of access. A visual representation may privilege sight, while movement and sound invite different ways of knowing. Participants considered how artists can communicate intensity without turning difference into spectacle, and how a sacred encounter might be made legible to people who were not physically present in the sanctuary.

Objects, memory and making

Jewish visual culture depends on objects that become inseparable from practice. Prayer books, kippot, tallit, Torah scrolls, synagogue textiles, candles, food and the Rosh Hashanah lulav and etrog carry use as well as symbolism. Their importance accumulates through repetition: an object is worn, opened, repaired, inherited and interpreted by successive generations.

Artists in the conference approached these materials in ways that respected their histories while avoiding simple illustration. A book might be opened to reveal two incompatible readings. A textile could be reconstructed as an abstract grid. An installation might arrange objects according to sound, touch or the movement of visitors rather than the order of a service. Such transformations ask what happens when an everyday ritual object enters an artistic setting.

Making also provided a bridge between tradition and contemporary labour. The conference showed that handwork, printmaking, textile practice and performance can carry intellectual and emotional weight without presenting themselves as timeless opposites to modern art. In Australia, this has particular relevance for artists negotiating the local gallery market, where contemporary craft can still be judged against inherited hierarchies between fine art and applied design.

Identity, gender and public space

The phrase “practicing Jews” foregrounded lived religious practice rather than identity as a fixed category. Presentations explored how observance varies across denominations, families and individuals, and how artists negotiate gender, sexuality, tradition and authority. Sacred language can include or exclude, and artistic expression may make space for experiences that institutional religion has not adequately represented.

Public and private space also shaped the conversation. The synagogue is a place of worship, community and memory, while the gallery offers distance, interpretation and sometimes dissent. Moving between them raises ethical questions about who has the right to represent Jewish life, whether audiences are invited as witnesses or observers, and how an artist handles material that carries both comfort and injury.

These questions resonate strongly in Melbourne and Sydney, home to substantial Jewish communities and institutions such as the Jewish Museum of Australia. Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur generally fall in September or October, placing the observances in Australia’s spring. Many communities gather for services, shofar and shared meals, while observant members arrange a daytime fast and seek accommodations at work or school, since the Jewish holidays are not usually Australian public holidays.

Taking the questions into Australian practice

Madison’s conference offered a model for connecting rigorous discussion with public exhibition. Its strongest insight was that artistic responses to Jewish ritual need not imitate religious architecture or explain belief from the outside. Artists can work with cadence, restriction, repetition, sound and material to create experiences that invite attention while leaving space for cultural and religious difference.

Australian artists encounter a distinct ecosystem of commercial galleries, artist-run spaces, public commissions and publicly funded cultural programmes. Creative Australia and state arts agencies support some projects, while philanthropic giving and community networks remain important in cities such as Melbourne and Sydney. A local exhibition on art and the High Holidays could therefore sit between these markets, bringing museum-style interpretation into conversation with synagogue, school and community audiences.

The concrete next step is a curatorial roundtable at an Australian Jewish cultural institution, paired with a commission for one artist to create a new work responding to the High Holidays.