queer at the root

The identity of the Jewish child of diaspora is one that is “split at the root” as first described by Adrienne Rich in Split at the Root: An Essay on Jewish Identity (1970). Adrienne Rich describes her removal from her own identities, and the complications of homes, family, faith and ancestry within Jewish cultures. She describes that many Jewish people, feeling they are only Jew-ish, always feeling a distance, or a gap from a sense of home in being a jew. How has this root splitting impacted the way our tongues twist, trying to relearn what is home – now, grasping to express the complexity of our beingness?

The work in this exhibition is all equally sacred – whether photography, collage, painting, crafted by youth artists or older artists – it all lives side by side, in the multiplicity of Jewishness, of queerness, of transness, and the non-hierarchical way our beingness creates and interweaves with each other. Queer at the Root beckons that we are always necessary to be witnessed, celebrated and understood in our multiplicity continuously. This exhibition features 18 artists, to affirm our life collectively. As in, together we become life itself. Here we are, creating to unsplit ourselves, to come back into our kin, to affirm we always were, in fact, here. At the deepest root, we express all of ourselves.