A: The CJM is my favorite Bay Area museum. It is where I feel most at home artistically. It is also where I have participated in many exhibitions, including quite a few Invitationals. I love that The Museum is both centered on Jewish themes and open to the experiences of other cultures and communities. The biannual Invitationals have included artists from diverse backgrounds, both Jewish and non-Jewish, who share their interpretations of Jewish ritual objects and themes. As a secular Jew and a member of the LGBTQ+ community, I have always felt welcome at The Museum, and have felt my experience to be validated and reflected in the content of many of the exhibitions. The combination of being rooted in the local community and at the same time part of the larger art world is uniquely wonderful, in my opinion.

A: I am working on a series of one-of-a-kind artist’s books called Bookscrapping, a play on the word “scrapbooking.” I am mining my failed and uncompleted pieces and rearranging them to make books that contain no written narrative, except for the occasional asemic writing, which is imagery that looks like writing but is not a real language. Viewers interact with the books by turning the pages and interpreting the imagery as they wish. It is immensely satisfying to cut up unsuccessful or meh-adjacent pieces and fragments that are lying around the studio inert, and reworking them to create quirky fiber books. The books have an ad hoc, asymmetrical quality.

A: I find inspiration anywhere I can, often with a material. During the first Trump administration, I made a series solely of shredded U.S. currency and metallic thread. During the pandemic I mined my studio for failed or incomplete pieces and fragments to create the series Raw Edge, based on a photo of a Brazilian graveyard for people who had died of COVID. The photo inspired a series based on rectangular shapes, which acted as mini-representations of lives lost to the virus. Self-help books found at a local recycling center became a series called Panacea Plus, and cowboy novels found at the same center inspired How the West Was Sewn, another series. I own two computerized sewing machines, and by messing with the pre-set alphabets, I made another series called The Wandering Alphabet. I mostly try to pay attention to my surroundings and see what I can come up with. Chance encounters with materials and images have yielded a wide array of themes and materials.

A: My favorite Jewish food is the humble bagel, the food of my youth and of fond memories, when my father and I went to the supermarket (Waldbaum’s in Long Beach, Long Island where I grew up) to buy lox, smoked salmon, sable, Greek olives, farmer’s cheese and red onions, for a weekend Jewish breakfast, with halvah for dessert. We bought the bagels somewhere else, though I can’t remember exactly where. The bagel for me is a comfort food and it is preferably either sesame or poppy. I depart from tradition to include whole wheat, but never blueberry. The chewy inside, the crispy outside! Nowadays I eat a bagel with goat cheese and avocado, an updated, vegetarian, West Coast version of the original combo.