When Stephanie Brown moved to the Bay Area she wasn’t sure where to find the local Jewish arts community. Then she realized why. It almost wasn’t on the map.
But Brown is in the midst of changing that.
As the current director of the Albert L. Schultz Jewish Community Center’s J-Connect and the annual To Life! Street Festival, she is organizing a Bay Area Jewish artists’ guild.
When she moved to San Francisco from Washington D.C. in 2004, Brown quickly noticed there was no organized forum for local Jewish artists to connect with one another, share information and collaborate.
Herself an artist who makes hand-painted silk tallitot and chuppot, Brown had been a member of ArtSites, a Washington, D.C., guild for Judaic art. Founded in 1984, ArtSites provides information and networking services for Jewish artists and Judaic art aficionados in the D.C. area.
Brown decided that a similar type of organization would be possible in the Bay Area. Her access to the database of participating artists in the To Life! festival, gave her the means to make it happen. Her plan for a Bay Area Jewish artists’ guild quickly began to take shape.
On average, 100 art vendors per year participate in To Life! “There are a ton of Jewish artists in the area,” Brown said. “And there is no distinctly Judaic artists’ guild.”
Brown has been organizing To Life! for the past two years; something she didn’t expect when she first became a vendor in 2003. Wendie Lash, the previous festival director, had invited Brown to apply to be a jury-selected participant in To Life when the two women met at an art conference.
Lash left the position in 2004, and Brown applied to be her replacement. No stranger to the administrative side of Jewish cultural festivals, Brown had previously organized “The Jewish Folk Arts Festival,” a small, indoor event in Washington, D.C., with music, food and crafts, for two years.
The newly forming Bay Area guild will be hosted by the JCC. “I envision it to be a resource for the community and a professional support network for artists,” Brown said.
In the works is a Web site that will allow local artists to assist one another with everything from finding the best materials to organizing joint exhibits.
It will also serve as an educational tool for the community at large. The guild will offer lectures, classes and workshops on various aspects of Judaic arts and history. “If a group wants to contact an artist to do a demonstration on making menorahs, they’ll know where to go,” Brown said.
Brown has been getting the word out via e-mail, and she will be handing out fliers at the festival. Response has been positive so far.
“It’s great to have people you can connect with and collaborate with,” she said. Other full-time artists have told her they share her feeling of “how lonely it can be.”
Unfortunately, the size of the Bay Area presents a challenge, Brown said. “People just don’t want to travel that far to go to a meeting.”
Still, she is confident a guild will only enrich the community. “Any time you get a group of people together with similar interests, a synergy is created.”
The upcoming planning meeting for the new guild will feature a presentation by metalworker Aimee Golant, who has been selected by the Kadima Women’s Torah Project to create a ritual crown for the first torah scribed by a woman.