Jewish Artist Experience: Lynne Avadenka

Date: Tuesday, June 30, 2020


Where: Virtual! Register online for Zoom link!
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Join the Vilna and artist Lynne Avadenka to explore her newest endeavor, an artistic investigation into Jewish women's involvement in early Hebrew printing. Lynne is an American artist/printmaker specializing in multimedia works influenced by the Jewish experience. She is known for her art that explores text and image, and the physical and philosophical idea of the book. Lynne Avadenka was the 2008 Hadassah-Brandeis Institute Artist in Residence.

From Sarah Rose Sharp's essay about Lynne's work: "Lynne Avadenka presses shapes into service. To look at her work is to ask what shapes mean, and to realize the potential of language, symbols, and form when wrested from their conventional usage. Things that were once agreed-upon become open to interpretation, a Tower of Babel that retains its structure, but leaves content in wild new arrangements.

Avadenka grapples continuously with the tension between language as a mechanism for precise communication, and language as a set of forms in abstraction. She grapples with language the way a ballet dancer grapples with gravity—a graceful, liberating, and forceful gesture against the inexorable weight of easy recognition.

.......and like language itself, her work is adaptive, fluid, and endlessly rearranged around principles fundamental to communication in ways that transcend specificity and approach the enviable state of universality.”

Among her awards are a 2009 Kresge Arts in Detroit Fellowship and individual artist grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Michigan Council for Arts and Cultural Affairs. In 2019, Avadenka received a Research Award from the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute and exhibited her work in the Jerusalem Biennale. Residencies and teaching opportunities have taken her to Germany, Israel, Italy, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New York, North Carolina, Oregon and Virginia.

Avadenka has been active in the Detroit arts community since receiving her MFA from Wayne State University in 1981. In 2013, Avadenka was named director of Signal-Return, a Detroit nonprofit letterpress print shop and community arts center, and in 2016 was awarded a Career Achievement Award from the Department of Fine and Performing Arts of Wayne State University.

Avadenka's art is exhibited and collected internationally, including The Barbican Center, London; The British Library, London; The Detroit Institute of Arts; The Jewish Museum, New York; The Israel Museum, Jerusalem; The Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; The New York Public Library; The Meermano Museum, The Hague, The Netherlands;  The Watson Library at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

In partnership with Hadassah-Brandeis Institute.