In case you missed Shabbat services, Sunnyvale artist Jackie Olenick offers a blessing to hang on your wall.
“Spread Over Us Your Canopy of Peace” is the title of her 18-by-24-inch depiction of the City of David in handmade paper, foil and ink.
“The collage in different colors represents a landscape of Jerusalem, its many textures and years of existing,” says the St. Paul, Minn., transplant who arrived here in September.
Framed and matted, the piece is one of many to be available at three Bay Area shows beginning Wednesday, Nov. 19 at the Addison-Penzak Jewish Community Center in Los Gatos.
Creating affordable art inspired by the Torah is Olenick’s mission. “Every home should have Jewish culture,” she says, and every nursery is where she thinks the process should start, as it did for her.
“Children should have Hebrew letters on their walls” in order to get the alphabet “in their memory cells” early on, says the grandmother of four.
Olenick’s Yiddish grandparents cross-stitched samples of letters for her when she lived with them above their tailoring shop in South Philadelphia.
Olenick also designs vividly colored silk-screened T-shirts, five of which she’ll show at her exhibits.
One depicts Miriam cavorting by the sea after the Israelis fended off the Egyptians. Wearing a pink dress, Moses’ sister dances in front of the artist’s rendering of ocean colors, in various shades of blue.
Miriam “is celebrating in a joyful dancing pose with a tambourine in her hand,” says Olenick, who penned the words “Leading the Dance Into the Future,” below the dancing figure.
The slogan has struck a responsive chord among members of Rosh Chodesh groups and sisterhoods around the country who have purchased a couple of thousand shirts after making a connection between their ancestor and themselves.
“They get it,” says the designer.
Not formally trained, Olenick began learning her craft from her bubbe and zayde who taught her how to sew back in the 1950s.
“I’ve been doing Judaic art for as long as I can remember,” she says.
After helping her husband Leon rear three children, she resigned her secretarial post at University of Minnesota three years ago to pursue art full-time.
“It was a good salary with good benefits, but the calling was too strong,” she says.
Olenick refers to herself as a “folk artist.”
“I don’t want to give the impression it’s fine art,” she says. Nevertheless, she has shown her works in juried art shows throughout America. “I travel to Judaica art fairs in Dallas, Philadelphia, Chicago and Indianapolis.”
And she never seems to struggle with ideas. In a matter of minutes she is able to dream up an image for a design. “It pops out in front of my eyes,” she says. “It doesn’t even feel like it belongs to me.” Her Miriam design, for example, took “five minutes.”
She maintains an active Jewish life. In St. Paul, she and her spouse — who is studying in an advanced chaplaincy program at Stanford University — helped establish a Jewish Renewal congregation with the help of Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi. Havurah Sivan is now 100 members strong. “We birthed it and we let it grow,” says Olenick.
She also directed By Heart and Hand, a Creative Workshop for Elders at the St. Paul Jewish Community Center. She taught Russian immigrants as well as American seniors how to design and sell greeting cards.
“Some were artists in Russia,” she says. “They didn’t know English, so they didn’t know how to acquire materials here to express themselves.”
Many of the 20 or so participants, in their 60s to 80s, came in “with shaking hands and bad eyes,” she says. “I would tape down the design and they would use their one good hand” to do the work.
Years earlier, Olenick’s bubbe helped refugees of a different sort. After the Holocaust, Anna Levin located survivors who had come to Philadelphia. “She took people in and took care of them.”
Olenick, born in 1946, still carries memories of a houseful of Yiddish-speaking people.
“I don’t remember locks on the doors,” she says, and she can’t recall many particulars about the survivors.
“I just remember them being very sad,” she says, “and very kind.”