Seattle artist Joan Rudd’s sculptures translate her Jewish heritage into visual form. Her pieces reflect a living culture and a shared memory.
“Each of my sculptures has a story,” she says. “I sculpt to capture special moments of connectedness between people, to capture a geometric unity of form and composition, and hopefully, to depict a warm and deep “˜sheinkeit’ or spiritual beauty.”
The exhibit presents a selection of Rudd’s sculptures, medallions and wall reliefs carved in clay. Most of these have Yiddish as well as English titles.
“I chose Yiddish titles to recognize my growing admiration for my folk heritage,” Rudd says. “The wry humor and boundless wisdom of Yiddish proverbs and songs sustains me both in my outlook on life and in my work. The influence of a culture that can cry and laugh at the same time cannot be underestimated.”
Commuters on METRO/ King County buses may already be familiar with Rudd’s visual evocation of Yiddish songs. She has illustrated murals for four bus shelters in Northeast Seattle, including words and music in the paintings. Rudd also spearheaded six years of local Yiddish language and culture conferences (Mame Loshn NW) funded by the Workmen’s Circle, and won an annual Ethnic Heritage Council award for her efforts. For two years, under a special pilot program grant, she devised curricula, taught songs, and told Yiddish stories to preschool children using a language-preservation model employed for Native Americans in the Northwest.
Although her parents were born in Europe and escaped to the United States just after the beginning of World War II, her relatives did not speak Yiddish at home. In spite of this, the syntax and attitudes embedded in that language have dominated Joan’s study of other languages. She began to study Yiddish as a living memorial for her father, and after his death found a sense of continued connection with others committed to preserving the language. In 1997, Rudd organized three Seattle performances of Der Yiddisher Mikado, a revival of a 1950s production in Yiddish of the Gilbert and Sullivan classic, The Mikado. Twenty-two actors and actresses traveled from Long Island for the first modern Yiddish theater production in the Seattle area.
Rudd is currently working on bringing the film The Yiddish Theater: A Love Story to Seattle. This documentary tells of the recent efforts of Zypora Spaisman to keep the Folksbiene Yiddish Theater alive in New York City.
Rudd decided she wanted to be an artist when, at age 10, she first saw Greco-Roman figurative sculpture on the island of Capri, Italy.
“Economy of line, clarity, and vitality have always been the qualities I value,” she says. She moved to the Pacific Northwest at age 17 to attend college and art school. Here she encountered Italic calligraphy, Chinese brush painting, and Japanese-inspired ceramics, all of which have continued to influence her work.
Elie Nadelman, a Polish Jewish sculptor who worked in Paris and settled in New York City just prior to World War II, remains one of Rudd’s major inspirations. Nadelman was a sophisticated sculptor who created a very modern folk art.
“Nadelman composed his figures with an awareness of economy and motion,” Rudd says. “He is able to stop time by creating still forms that appear to have motion. Creating a sense of the infinity of time is a very Jewish concept. Think Shabbat. The books of Martin Buber describe how the material world disappears but time and eternity remain.”
As a Jewish sculptor, Rudd is conscious of the relationship between art and spirituality. Though statues could be considered idols and forbidden by halachah (traditional Jewish practice), Rudd says her sculptures are designed to teach. Her works convey transitory and alive moments of human emotion and the resilience of the people expressing them. Presenting a spiritual outlook through sculpture is an art form akin to telling stories and producing plays.
Rudd is not carving nostalgia, however. She depicts tenderness without being sentimental. The works she has on display are both three-dimensional pieces and flat medallions, each cut into slabs of clay, and then fired or cast in bronze.
“You have to see deep into the material, as if with x-ray vision, to cut away what is not necessary and to leave only the minimum material to depict it all,” she says. “Carving into firm clay blocks is direct and fast. The limits of technique force me to find the large movements within the figure. The result is simple, clear, and as alive as I can make it.”
Perhaps Rudd’s interest in sculpting with clay is genetic. Her maternal grandfather manufactured noodles in Paris in the 1920s, but he became bored. He decided to put his capital into molds for casting portrait heads of the future Edward the VIII, King of England. When Edward abdicated the throne to marry Wallace Simpson, there was no coronation and no need for commemorative memorabilia, and her grandfather went back to running a noodle factory. Rudd believes her current work in clay at the “wedging” table is but an extension of the old-fashioned home noodle board — mix, knead, roll out, then cut up.