Lecture at Art Palm Beach with Ori Z. Soltes and Booksigning
EVENT “Jewish Identity and Intensity in the Work of George Wardlaw”
SPEAKER Ori Z. Soltes
DATE Saturday, January 21, 2012
TIME 1:30 – 2:30pm
BOOK SIGNING Immediately folling the lecture with George Wardlaw and Ori Soltes
“Jewish Identity and Intensity in the Work of George Wardlaw” The art of George Wardlaw offers an ongoing dance between immutable ideas and those that keep changing. He has never allowed his work to stay confined by categories—his painting is sculptural, his sculpture is both painterly and architectural, his early small-scale metalsmithing resonate within his later gargantuan artworks. Wardlaw’s work reflects art history in both its universal concerns and, in a varied array of works, in the questions that art history raises for contemporary Jewish artists: Where does our work fit into Western art, which for so many centuries has been largely Christian art? What sorts of subjects are particularly relevant to “Jewish” art? What elements of style and symbol? How obvious or covert ought the reflections to these issues be? His work is a dazzling expression of diversely shaped identity and intensity.
Biography for Ori Z. Soltes Ori Z. Soltes is Professorial Lecturer in Theology and Fine Arts at Georgetown University and former director of the B’nai B’rith Klutznick National Jewish Museum in Washington, DC, where he curated over 80 exhibitions on a variety of subjects. He is the author of articles, exhibition catalogs, essays, and books on a range of topics, including Fixing the World: American Jewish Painters in the Twentieth Century, Our Sacred Signs: How Jewish, Christian and Muslim Art Draw from the Same Source, Searching for Oneness: Mysticism in the Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and Untangling the Web: A Thinking Person’s Guide to Why the Middle East is a Mess and Always Has Been. He is currently completing a book on the definition of Jewish art and architecture called Tradition and Transformation.