Gilah Yelin Hirsch

Last updated
Gilah Yelin Hirsch
Gilah Hirsch.JPG
Born1944 (age 7980)
Montreal, Quebec, Canada
NationalityCanadian-American
EducationUC Berkeley (BA), UCLA (MFA)
Website https://gilah.com/

Gilah Yelin Hirsch (born 1944) is a multidisciplinary artist who works as a painter, writer, curator, and filmmaker. Her work explores the connections between science, art, and spirituality. She has been a leader in the International Society for the Study of Subtle Energies and Energy Medicine (ISSSEEM). [1] Hirsch was a founding member of one of the earliest women art organizations, the Los Angeles Council of Women in the Arts (LACWA) and was active in the feminist art movement in Southern California. She was a professor of art at California State University, Dominguez Hills in Los Angeles since 1973 and became Professor Emerita in 2020. Presently, Hirsch continues painting, writing, theorizing, and filmmaking, and is often invited to present her work in conferences and webinars world-wide. [2]

Contents

Early life

Hirsch grew up in a Montreal Jewish community in the mid-1940s, reading and learning from the Torah in Hebrew and Yiddish at an early age. [3] Her secular schooling was in English and French. [4] While striving to learn about the world, Hirsch faced much emotional strife during her formative years. This was because of both her mother's mental illness and father's invalid state. To help her endure these physical and emotional assaults, Hirsch read "... the great philosophers, writers, early feminists, Freud and Jung, all included in the floor to ceiling library of my parents' small apartment." [4]

Hirsch later on published Demonic to Divine: The Double Life of Shulamis Yelin, a book that includes excerpts of Hirsch's mother's diaries and some of her stories. [5]

Hirsch earned a B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1967, and an MFA in pictorial arts from UCLA in 1970. [6] After graduating she taught at Santa Monica College and the University of Judaism, (now American Jewish University). Then in 1973, Hirsch joined the art department at California State University Dominguez Hills in Los Angeles, and obtained tenure in 1978. [7] She is now Professor Emerita.

Career

Hirsch was a founding member of the Los Angeles Council of Women Artists (LACWA) (1971), the "mother" organization of many subsequent feminist art organizations. [8] She also named and facilitated the Joan of Art Seminars, (originated by June Wayne), teaching artists the business aspects of their professional careers. Since then (1972), this has become common practice and a regular component of art school curricula. [9] [10] Hirsch said, "Who knew that what we were doing would become historic and significant in the history of art? Prior to that, women did not exist in art." [11]

In 1974 Hirsch brought the life and work of Canadian artist Emily Carr to the attention of the American academic community at the College Art Association, Washington, DC. [9] [12] [13]

Hirsch curated the exhibition, Metamagic, in 1978 at the California State University Dominguez Hills University Art Gallery in Los Angeles. This exhibit was the first held nationally in a major exhibition space to be focused on the spiritual in art and attracted worldwide attention. [14] In 2009 she coordinated Stepping into the Light, an exhibition of portraits by California State University Dominguez Hills art students of women who had been sexually assaulted; these works were exhibited in the Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA) in Carson. The exhibition was went on to show in New York, London, New Zealand, China, Mexico, and the Congo and other parts of Africa. [15]

Hirsch spent the fall semester of 1979 as visiting artist at Saint Martin's School of Art, London, England. She introduced her painting and its related philosophical explorations at the Menninger Foundation's annual conference on consciousness in Council Grove, Kansas (1982). Hirsch has been a presenter for numerous Council Grove conferences (sponsored by the Menninger Foundation, Life Science Institute, Center for Ecology and Energy Medicine) and has convened two conferences (1995, 2006). In 1983 Hirsch first presented her theory on the origin of alphabet, Cosmography: The Writing of the Universe, at the Council Grove Conference. [14]

In 1985 Hirsch received a senior artist grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, [16] which – with a sabbatical from California State University – facilitated her year-long travel in Asia. [4] In December 1986 she met Ngawangdanhup Narkyid (Kuno), the official biographer of the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala, India, initiating a friendship that would prove to be life-changing for the artist. [17]

Among Hirsch's numerous exhibitions since 1968, she has shown at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) in California, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, Hebrew Union College in California, 2011 Vincent Gallery, Moscow, Russia, 2009 Symbol Galeria, Budapest (Hungary), 2007 Piano Nobile Gallery, Kraków (Poland), 2006 Soviart Gallery, Kiev (Ukraine), 2006 Artoteka Gallery, Bratislava and 2005 Limes Galeria, Komarno (Slovakia), and the Jerusalem Biennale. [18] Her archives are housed in the Smithsonian Archives of American Art. [11] [19]

Hirsch has also pursued an interest in architecture, and over a period of 35 years restored a 1900s duplex in Venice, California. Her house is featured in the 2010 book Cottages in the Sun: Bungalows of Venice, California. [20]

Films

Hirsch wrote and produced two documentary films, Cosmography: The Writing of the Universe (1995) and Reading the Landscape (2019), which was a Silver Winner at the International Independent Film Awards (Winter 2019). [21]

Books and publications

Hirsch authored three books to date and has been published in countless journals with various areas of focus. She connects them all to her artwork.

Presentions

Besides being a CSU Dominguez Hills Professor of Art Emerita (Department of Art & Design), Hirsch has given many lectures and presentations around the world.

Significant events

Source: [2]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">California State University, Dominguez Hills</span> Public university in Carson, California

California State University, Dominguez Hills is a public university in Carson, California. It was founded in 1960 and is part of the California State University (CSU) system.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Eleanor Antin</span> American artist and film-maker (born 1935)

Eleanor Antin is an American performance artist, film-maker, installation artist, conceptual artist, feminist artist, and university professor.

Lowery Stokes Sims is an American art historian and curator of modern and contemporary art known for her expertise in the work of African, African American, Latinx, Native and Asian American artists such as Wifredo Lam, Fritz Scholder, Romare Bearden, Joyce J. Scott and others. She served on the curatorial staff of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Museum of Arts and Design. She has frequently served as a guest curator, lectured internationally and published extensively, and has received many public appointments. Sims was featured in the 2010 documentary film !Women Art Revolution.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Linda Nochlin</span> American art historian

Linda Nochlin was an American art historian, Lila Acheson Wallace Professor Emerita of Modern Art at New York University Institute of Fine Arts, and writer. As a prominent feminist art historian, she became well known for her pioneering 1971 article "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?" published by ARTnews.

Faith Wilding is a Paraguayan American multidisciplinary artist - which includes but is not limited to: watercolor, performance art, writing, crocheting, knitting, weaving, and digital art. She is also an author, educator, and activist widely known for her contribution to the progressive development of feminist art. She also fights for ecofeminism, genetics, cyberfeminism, and reproductive rights. Wilding is Professor Emerita of performance art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">June Wayne</span>

June Claire Wayne was an American painter, printmaker, tapestry innovator, educator, and activist. She founded Tamarind Lithography Workshop (1960–1970), a then California-based nonprofit print shop dedicated to lithography.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sweet Alice Harris</span> American community organizer

Alice Harris, also known as "Sweet Alice", is a community organizer, based in Watts, Los Angeles, California, as the founder and executive director of Parents of Watts, a local youth outreach group.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Judithe Hernández</span> American Chicana artist

Judithe Hernández is an American artist and educator, she is known as a muralist, pastel artist, and painter. She is a pioneer of the Chicano art movement and a former member of the art collective Los Four. She is based in Los Angeles, California and previously lived in Chicago.

Joyce Aiken is an American feminist art historian, artist, and educator. Aiken taught the subject for over 20 years at California State University, Fresno, and assisted her students in opening a feminist art gallery. This helped put Fresno, California on the map as a key place for the feminist art movement. Most recently, she served as the director of the Fresno Arts Council.

Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett is a scholar of Performance and Jewish Studies and a museum professional. Professor Emerita of Performance Studies at New York University, she is best known for her interdisciplinary contributions to Jewish studies and to the theory and history of museums, tourism, and heritage. She is currently the Ronald S. Lauder Chief Curator of the Core Exhibition and Advisor to the Director at POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Katherine Westphal</span> Textile artist from Los Angeles, California, USA

Katherine Westphal was an American textile designer and fiber artist who helped to establish quilting as a fine art form.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Phyllis Yes</span>

Phyllis Yes is an Oregon-based artist and playwright. Her artistic media range from works on painted canvas to furniture, clothing, and jewelry. She is known for her works that “feminize” objects usually associated with a stereotypically male domain, such as machine guns, hard hats, and hammers. Among her best-known artworks are “Paint Can with Brush,” which appears in Tools as Art, a book about the Hechinger Collection, published in 1996 and her epaulette jewelry, which applies “feminine” lace details to the epaulette, a shoulder adornment that traditionally symbolizes military prowess. In 1984 she produced her controversial and widely noted “Por She,” a silver 1967 Porsche 911-S, whose body she painstakingly painted in highly tactile pink and flesh-toned lace rosettes. She exhibited it at the Bernice Steinbaum Gallery in New York in 1984 and drove it across the United States as a traveling exhibition in 1985. In 2016, she wrote her first play, Good Morning Miss America, which began its first theatrical run at CoHo Theatre in Portland, Oregon in March 2018.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Vidya Dehejia</span> Indian art historian and curator

Vidya Dehejia is a retired academic and the Barbara Stoler Miller Professor Emerita of Indian and South Asian Art at Columbia University. She has published 24 books and numerous academic papers on the art of South Asia, and has curated many exhibitions on the same theme.

Yreina Cervantez is an American artist and Chicana activist who is known for her multimedia painting, murals, and printmaking. She has exhibited nationally and internationally, and her work is in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, The Mexican Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum, and the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Vivian E. Browne</span> American artist

Vivian E. Browne was an American artist. Born in Laurel, Florida, Browne was mostly known for her painting series called Little Men and her Africa series. She is also known for linking abstraction to nature in her tree paintings and in a series of abstract works made with layers of silk that were influenced by her travels to China. She was an activist, professor, and has received multiple awards for her work. According to her mother, Browne died at age 64 from bladder cancer.

Ruth Weisberg is an American artist and Professor of Fine Arts at the University of Southern California, where she is also former dean of the USC Roski School of Art and Design. Weisberg's work is influenced by her Jewish heritage and its traditions, the human body, and feminist themes. She works primarily in painting, and her recent work is produced in scroll formats.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Suzanne Jackson (artist)</span> American visual artist

Suzanne Jackson is an American visual artist, gallery owner, poet, dancer, educator, and set designer; with a career spanning five decades. Her work has been exhibited in museums and galleries around the world. Since the late 1960s, Jackson has dedicated her life to studio art with additional participation in theatre, teaching, arts administration, community life, and social activism. Jackson's oeuvre includes poetry, dance, theater, costume design, paintings, prints, and drawings.

Josine Ianco-Starrels was a Romanian-born American art curator who worked as a museum director in Los Angeles, California.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Consuelo Jimenez Underwood</span> Mexican-American textile artist

Consuelo Jiménez Underwood is an American fiber artist, known for her pieces that focus on immigration issues. She is an indigenous Chicana currently based in Cupertino, California. As an artist she works with textiles in attempt to unify her American roots with her Mexican Indigenous ones, along with trying to convey the same for other multicultural people.

Yong Soon Min was a South Korean-born American artist, curator, and educator. She served as professor emeritus at the University of California, Irvine. Her artwork deals with issues including Korean-American identity, politics, personal narrative, and culture. Min was active in New York City and Los Angeles.

References

  1. "Gilah Yelin Hirsch: Artist Named Co-President Elect of Energy Medicine Society". CSUDH Campus News Center. January 26, 2011. Retrieved February 15, 2021.
  2. 1 2 "Resume Gilah Yelin Hirsch". 2024. Retrieved 2021-03-29.
  3. Margolis, Judith (2007). "Torah Study, Feminism and Spiritual Quest in the Work of Five American Jewish Women Artists". Nashim: A Journal of Jewish Women's Studies & Gender Issues. 14 (14): 97–130. doi:10.2979/nas.2007.-.14.97. JSTOR   10.2979/nas.2007.-.14.97. S2CID   162274882.
  4. 1 2 3 Hirsch, Gilah Yelin (September 2020). "Green Tara and the Dalai Lama's Biographer" (PDF). The International Journal of Healing and Caring. 20: 1–20.
  5. Hirsch, Marrelli (2014). Demonic to Divine. Vehicle Press. ISBN   9781550653830.
  6. "Gilah Hirsch - Artist". MacDowell. Retrieved 2021-03-20.
  7. "Gilah Yelin Hirsch country, Place Of Birth, Marriage, Money Factor, Waist Hip, Dress, Hair Shape" . Retrieved 2021-03-20.
  8. Wilding, Faith, By Our Own Hands, Double X, Santa Monica, CA, 1977.
  9. 1 2 Love, Barbara J.Feminists Who Changed America, 1963-1975. University of Illinois Press, 2006. Pages:213-214.
  10. "Oral history interview with Rachel Rosenthal, 1989 Sept. 2-3 - Oral Histories | Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution". Archived from the original on August 4, 2011. Retrieved February 21, 2012.
  11. 1 2 "CSU Dominguez Hills Professor Gilah Hirsch's Documents Archived in Smithsonian — CSUDH News". news.csudh.edu. Retrieved 2021-03-20.
  12. "College of Arts & Humanities". Archived from the original on April 3, 2012. Retrieved February 21, 2012.
  13. The Feminist Art Journal, Emily Carr,Gilah Yelin Hirsch, Summer 1976, Vol. 5.3
  14. 1 2 Nelson, Mary Carroll. Artists of the Spirit: New Prophets in Art and Mysticism. California, Arcus Publishing, 1994.
  15. "We Step into the Light « We Step into the Light". Archived from the original on February 7, 2011. Retrieved April 12, 2012.
  16. "1985 Annual Report 20th Anniversary" (PDF). National Endowment for the Arts: 171. 1985.
  17. Nelson, Mary Carroll.Artists of the Spirit: New Prophets in Art and Mysticism.CA, Arcus Publishing Co., 1994.
  18. "Gilah Hirsch". Saatchi Art. Retrieved 2021-03-20.
  19. "Smithsonian Archives of American Art". Smithsonian Archives of American Art. Retrieved February 15, 2021.
  20. 2010 Cottages in the Sun: Bungalows of Venice, California, Margaret Bach (Author), Melba Levick (Photographer), Rizzoli, Mar. 2; 2007
  21. "List of Award Winners IIFA". International Independent Film Awards. Retrieved February 15, 2021.