JAI Featured Member/September 2025
Jonathan Skurnik
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JAI Featured Member
Jonathan Skurnik
September 2025
JAI Featured Member
Jonathan Skurnik
September 2025
When I was eight years old, my father lent me his battered movie camera and I made my first animated film. After I fed the super 8mm reel into the projector and watched my creation come alive on the white wall, I was hooked. In my 20s, I wrote and published a literary magazine, then returned to filmmaking in my 30s, while also adding painting, sculpture and installation to my practice. After making films for nearly 30 years, directing and shooting six award-winning PBS documentaries and more than fifty short documentary and narrative films, I am back in school getting both an MFA from Cal State LA and an MA in Fine Art from City & Guilds School of Art in London.
Since my assimilating parents didn’t provide me with a traditional Jewish education, art has become an important vehicle to explore my Jewish identity and my Ukrainian heritage. Many of my installations both made and not yet realized involve Jewish themes, history or identity.
My current art practice includes painting, sculpture, video, installation and etching. Some of the ideas and issues I am currently exploring in my work include: armed conflict and resistance/resilience; Christian hegemony and antisemitism; the challenges of connection in a capitalist and technologically mediated culture; economic class; and the use of color and form inspired by nature. Please visit my website for a September sale of recent work: jskurnik.com.
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When I was eight years old, my father lent me his battered movie camera and I made my first animated film. After I fed the super 8mm reel into the projector and watched my creation come alive on the white wall, I was hooked. In my 20s, I wrote and published a literary magazine, then returned to filmmaking in my 30s, while also adding painting, sculpture and installation to my practice. After making films for nearly 30 years, directing and shooting six award-winning PBS documentaries and more than fifty short documentary and narrative films, I am back in school getting both an MFA from Cal State LA and an MA in Fine Art from City & Guilds School of Art in London.
Since my assimilating parents didn’t provide me with a traditional Jewish education, art has become an important vehicle to explore my Jewish identity. Many of my installations both made and not yet realized involve Jewish themes, history or identity.
My current art practice includes painting, sculpture, video, installation and etching. Some of the ideas and issues I am currently exploring in my work include: armed conflict and resistance/resilience; Christian hegemony and antisemitism; the challenges of connection in a capitalist and technologically mediated culture; economic class; and the use of color and form inspired by nature. Please visit my website for a September sale of recent work: jskurnik.com.
Untitled, 2025
Donetsk, 2025
My current body of sculptures examines the historical and contemporary conflict between Russia and Ukraine. Donetsk utilizes the metaphor of bowling pins and balls as a launching point for a commentary on war and resilience in general and Russia’s unprovoked war of aggression against their neighboring sovereign nation of Ukraine in particular. The series consists of two sets of ten pins and a single ball with each set: Donetsk and Kiev, two cities in Ukraine that have witnessed intense bombing and destruction. The series also includes several individual pins that have been shattered and re-built using clay and straw, a traditional Ukrainian construction technique. The pieces are unapologetically anti-war, comment on the impact of violence and genocide, and point towards peace, resilience, and healing from intergenerational trauma.
Holodomor Anti-Memorial, 2025
What began as a stuffed, oversized bread clip—inspired by the work of Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen—evolved into a plan to create a series of anti-monuments in select North American cities and villages across Eastern Ukraine. The sculpture reads “Best If Used By 07 Aug 1932,” which is the date that Stalin’s regime made it illegal for Ukrainian villagers who resisted collectivization to eat their own wheat. As a result, it is estimated that as many as four million Ukrainian men, women and children were murdered or died of starvation. The sculpture is made of biodegradable jute and stuffed with wheat berries. Each Clip will lay on bare earth where it will disintegrate, a small plot of wheat growing in its place. The memorial evokes the process of healing from trauma by participating in Nature’s regenerative cycle—biodegrading in order to support new life, new growth and new nourishment.
Wrestling with Hegemony, 2025
Why are the death and resurrection of a Jewish sage named Y’Shua celebrated by Christians with Easter bunnies and decorated eggs? Christianity’s appropriation of the life of a Jewish teacher into a proselytizing religion that has served for more than 1,500 years as the justification for the colonization and genocide of civilizations around the globe serves as the background and underlying investigation in my new body of paintings, sculpture and installation. I begin by affixing antisemitic, mid-century German propaganda onto wood panels and canvases and paint a surface layer of Easter iconography in transparent pastels, such as eggs, bunnies, and jellybeans. From afar, the eye recognizes only the icons of Easter. Up close, one spies the collaged and distressed underlayer through the paint’s transparency, provoking a cognitive dissonance that symbolizes the experience of those whose traditions are at best ignored and at worst destroyed, by Christian Hegemony.
Before graduate school, I created a body of work that included photography, painting and etching. The photography series Unseen City documents urban ephemera in cities I’ve lived in and visited over the last decade. I’m fascinated by the way erosion and decay impact the physical world. These forces collaborate with human interventions to fashion profound beauty in built and urban landscapes: ragged and undulating shapes, clashes of color and light, familiar images upended, destroyed, nearly unrecognizable—but always beautiful.
New York City (89th Street), 2022
Oaxaca (Red Fish), 2022
Thank you!
About JAI
Jewish Artists Initiative (JAI) is a Southern California organization committed to supporting Jewish artists and arts professionals. JAI aspires to be an agent of transformative change by organizing provocative exhibitions and thoughtful programs promoting diverse dialogue about Jewish identity and experiences. Founded in 2004, JAI remains committed to fostering Jewish culture in our community and beyond.
MISSION AND HISTORY
JAI was conceived by the Jewish Community Foundation of Los Angeles in 2004. It was originally in partnership with the University of Southern California Casden Institute and the USC Roski School of Art and Design. For many years we have been under the fiscal sponsorship of the Center for Jewish Culture and Creativity. Members include primarily artists, as well as curators and art historians based in Southern California. The artists go through a jurying process to be admitted as members.
We have collaborated with a great range of Southern California institutions including American Jewish University, Hebrew Union College, UCLA Hillel and USC Hillel as well as a variety of art galleries and public spaces. We have also worked and exhibited in institutions in other parts of the United States and Israel such as the Jewish Art Salon, Hebrew Union College, New York, the New York UJA and the Jerusalem Biennale.
JAI BOARD MEMBERS
Bill Aron, Isaac Brynjegard-Bialik, Anne Hromadka Greenwald, Gilah Yelin Hirsch
Sagi Refael, Doni Silver Simons, Hillel Smith, Ruth Weisberg, Cathy Weiss
How to Become a JAI Member: JAI welcomes applications for membership from artists and arts professionals. For how to apply and to view the selection criteria click on Join JAI in the navigation links at the top or bottom of any page. Questions: contact JAI at admin@jaisocal.org
