JAI Featured Member/December 2024
Jana Zimmer
………………….
JAI Featured Member
Jana Zimmer
December 2024
JAI Featured Member
Jana Zimmer
December 2024
Jana Zimmer was an environmental lawyer, and now is a Santa Barbara writer and mixed media artist. She has exhibited over the last thirty years in California, Germany, Prague in the Czech Republic and at the Terezin Ghetto Museum, plus through JAI, in the Jerusalem Biennale. Her artwork has been focused since 1994 on themes of feminism in the traveling exhibition, WBB: Women Beyond Borders: Environmentalism, in imagery contained in her book, Navigating the California Coastal Act (Solano Press, 2017) and throughout her career on generational trauma, refugees and immigrants, wherever they land.
Most recently, she is the author of Chocolates from Tangier: A Holocaust Replacement Child’s Memoir of Art and Transformation (Doppelhouse Press, 2023), which has been translated and distributed in Germany as Pralinen Aus Tanger (Hentrich & Hentrich, 2024). It has also been translated to Czech, and she is hopeful of making it available in Spanish. She has recently begun working with populations, including immigrant youth, in collage workshops focusing on their immigrant/refugee experience.
For Ritta, assemblage, 1990, her first piece, reflects the expression “replacement child.”
Balkan Shoe, assemblage, 1995
………………….
She made “Balkan Shoe”, reflecting on the refugee experience in the Balkan Wars of the early 1990s . The writings are her mother’s repatriation documents after liberation from Mauthausen.
Josef and Ritta in the Promised Land, 2023 is a digital collage with a photo of her father and half-sister, Ritta, who perished in Auschwitz in 1944.
Our Olive Tree / Army of Boys
Reference to the olive tree, in this instance, is ironic. Jana’s father, an Auschwitz survivor, was an anti-zionist. Her mother, who was in a Maccabee group in Moravia as a teenager in 1929, finally gave herself permission to visit Israel after her husband died.
If viewed by Palestinians, this depicts their people, boy soldiers. But the image itself is a multiple of a photograph of Fritz Kohn, Zimmer’s maternal uncle, as a boy. Murdered in Sachsenhausen, late 1944. His son, Zimmer’s only first cousin, was born in Terezin, and was taken to Israel in 1949.
Images which, when they were produced, meant one thing, and now, with the passage of time and events, mean another:
Untitled, after the Gaviota Fire, 2015
………………….
This digital collage depicts a charred landscape, with native flowers, after a wildfire. The tiny family of surviving creatures now reads as Zimmer’s own family, refugees from communism in 1948.
Climate Holocaust, Jews Included, digital collage on silk tissue – was titled several years ago
As the spiral of life continues and winds down, Zimmer has become frustrated with words. Now she is more interested in visual representations, abstraction, asemic writing/imagery and music, and in coming back from the digital world to the material.
She Weeps, 2023, collage and watercolor
………………….
Additional work can be viewed on Zimmer’s website which will be reconstructed after she understands how she is to respond to the inversion of history and reality in which we now live. Contact her at zimmerccc@gmail.com or (805) 705-3784 for a full list of exhibitions and artworks.
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, Debra Sokolow, 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