In our series on artists participating in our current exhibit Silent Witnesses: Synagogues Transformed, Rebuilt, or Left Behind, we focus this time on a team of collaborators from St. Louis: Susan Shender and James Stone Goodman.
Silent Witnesses is Collaborative Art Exhibit organized by the Cultural Heritage Artists Project, the Jewish Art Salon, JWalks and the Holocaust Memorial Center. February 22 - April 14, 2012 at the Holocaust Memorial Center in Metro Detroit.
The Scrolls of the St. Louis South Side Congregation
In this project, influenced by talismanic and incantational Ethiopian scroll art, Goodman and Shender tell the story of a synagogue and two communities in three scrolls of poetry, prose, and visual imagery. Previously they collaborated on several projects exploring hybrid art forms including interior architecture, mosaics and story, Yemenite text preservation and story telling. They also created a small gallery in a synagogue space exploring the intersection of visual art, story, song, and performance.
The South Side Congregation project began with Goodman, a native of Detroit, who moved to St. Louis. Out of an experience with a found piece of synagogue stained glass, he came to know a community that was little documented in his new home. In 1995 he wrote the story of the glass window, the synagogue where it was once installed, the community that occupied the space, and the return of Jewish prayer to that space in a combination prose and poetry form.
