3.9 Nine Faces of Women by Susan Schrott

Apposite in overall conception to Gelman’s sculpture, extending the family yet further but focusing on it through a gendered lens, “Nine Faces of Women,” by Susan Schrott, from Shelter Island, NY, depicts bright faces, very much alive—each suffused with color and “framed” in strips of black—in a large textile hanging. These are all faces inspired by members of the artist’s family, some alive and some long gone. She views these wide-eyed visages—of “women who are strong, confident, and possess a unique beauty”—strewn across a boldly pigmented field overrun with rococo patterns of quilted texture that are intended to suggest the endless tendrils of a tree of life, as offering a hope for the continuity of both family and community. The family tree is a tree of life to those who converse with its branches and blossoms through unfiltered time.

If Weinstein’s second piece reminds us that not every turn toward the personal and familial is connected to historical narratives, other works, like those of Gelman and Schrott, underscore the principle that neither are those turns necessarily twisted in a negative direction. This doesn’t mean that, brought to life through the instrumentation of memory, they are not reshaped by that most exquisite but flawed of human instruments. Jewish identity, like human identity overall, is fraught with memory and its re-considerations and re-visions of historical, familial and personal details.