A year ago, Stephanie Brown traveled across the country to tote her hand-colored tallitot to “To Life! A Jewish Cultural Street Festival.” She was so taken with the region that she decided to move from the Washington, D.C., area. This year, she’s directing the fifth annual fair on Palo Alto’s California Avenue.
The position gives her an opportunity to merge her career training in marketing, her love of the arts and her dedication to Jewish outreach.
“Moving nearly 3,000 miles was scary,” she admits. But “this area is so gorgeous, physically beautiful. Almost everybody I know says San Francisco is their favorite city, and as an artist, I love the Victorians. I live in a Victorian. It’s eye candy to live in San Francisco.”
It all started in 2003, when Brown, who organized the Jewish Folk Arts Festival in Rockville, Md., was attending a Jewish outreach conference in Baltimore. There she met Wendie Bernstein Lash, the former director of New Bridges and the Palo Alto fair, and Bobbi Bornstein, former program director. They talked her into participating in last year’s festival as an artist.
In January, Brown heard that the position of festival director was open and she was hired. She packed her bags.
“Since Sept. 11, D.C. has become a very stressful place,” she said. “I didn’t want to be there. I was looking at places to move. … I loved the area.”
She moved not only to head the fair but to grow as an artist, with studio space in Berkeley.
Her other career is Simcha Silks (www.simchasilks.com), jewel-toned silk tallitot created mainly for bat mitzvahs and women, as well as chuppot, a business that also began as a hobby. As part of the process, she likes the honoree to become involved in tying the knots of the tzitzit, and has a ritual around the tying itself.
“My background is Jewish Renewal — how do we take our heritage and bring it to the 21st century in the most meaningful way,” she says. “It’s a spiritual practice for me, my art.”
Art was not part of Brown’s training — or spiritual direction — while growing up in a Conservative kosher home in Knoxville, Tenn. “My mother had to import meat from Atlanta,” she said. In her youth, she was involved in BBYO, Young Judaea, and later, Hillel at the University of Tennessee, where she received a B.S. in business. “I wanted to be marketable in the corporate world.”
Although she says she’s “been an event planner since second grade,” she turned that skill into a career following years of working in the corporate and nonprofit spheres.
While she never left Jewish life, after becoming exposed to the Jewish Renewal movement in Virginia Beach, “I knew I found my home.” She began lighting Shabbat candles and staying home on Friday night. She also attended retreats and decided to create a tallit for herself.
“My whole life fused together — the Judaism piece, the art piece and the Jewish event programmer,” she says
The “To Life!” fair is part of that connection.
“One of the things I love is there may be one person who has no connection to Judaism who might experience something that may reconnect them,” she says. “This festival is not just for the affiliated. There’s a lot of outreach, a lot of people who call themselves Jewish experience something that brings them back — whether it’s the music, the art, seeing a child do a project — and they take the next step.”
Just as Brown never set out to be a festival director, she never planned to be an art professional. She began her first showing with silk scarves — “I felt I needed to work my way up to doing tallit.” Later, chuppot followed.
“I’m about color,” she says. “I’m a colorist. That’s the focus of my work. Also calligraphy.”
When she designs a tallit, she might put a psalm, a biblical verse, a line from a Jewish song or something particularly meaningful to the client on the atarah, the neckpiece, “instead of just the blessing, because once you learn it, you don’t need it on the tallit. A tallit represents being wrapped in the arms of a loving God. It’s a holy process to make one and definitely to wear one. Whenever you feel you need to be enveloped by God, it creates a holy space.”
The space on California Avenue will be a bit noisier, more boisterous. Brown is particularly excited about the new “Jewish American Idol” contest this year.
Although as festival director she won’t be able to exhibit this year, she’s happy that more than 100 other artists and craftspeople will be in Palo Alto, including a couple of colleagues from Washington, D.C.
When the fair is over, her goal is to create a Judaica artists guild in the Bay Area.”Being an artist can be a lonely thing,” she says. But combining it with event planning “is a great fit,” enabling Brown to nurture the introverted and extroverted sides of her personality. “I’m a Gemini.”