Jewish Traces - Hillel Smith
Jewish Traces
Hillel Smith
Thursday, October 22nd, 7-9 PM
Hillel Smith is an illustrator, designer, and muralist originally from Los Angeles and now based in Washington, DC. He focuses on pushing the aesthetic boundaries of Jewish art by fusing modern techniques like digital graphics and spray paint with ancestral texts and rituals. His Parsha Posters series is on display at UCLA Hillel on the ground floor. He has painted dynamic Jewish murals around the world and is the founder of the Jewish Street Art Festival. Through his large scale public projects, he advocates for placemaking and visibility in multicultural environments. He is fascinated by Hebrew typographic history and teaches about the interaction of technology, identity, and design.Artist statement:Years ago, a chance bike ride through South LA led me past a church with an old Hebrew lintel. Research revealed that this had once been a synagogue before the building was sold. In my mural and installation practice, I focus on the question of what makes a Jewish space. These former synagogues prompted another question: how do we relate to spaces that were once, but are no longer, Jewish? Over the last seven years, I have photographed hundreds of former synagogue buildings all over the country. Now mostly churches but also retail shops, apartment buildings, performance venues, and occasionally crumbling vacant shells, these buildings exemplify the dynamic evolution that defines local Jewish communities, and more broadly, life in an ever-changing urban environment. The photographs mark moments in the afterlife of the Jewish built environment, revealing surprising mosaics of histories and faiths. In highlighting incongruous layers of use and the exposed traces of vanished Jewish presence, I charge the viewer to consider the ties that bind us together through time and architecture.