How can artists use materials to express spirituality, cultural identity, and joy? This question lies at the heart of "Material Wonder: Jewish Joy and Mysticism in 2025," an exhibition at Drawing Rooms in Jersey City, on view through April 5, 2025.
Curated by Anne Trauben, the show features the work of five contemporary artists who engage with Jewish themes through a wildly diverse array of materials: Pesya Altman, Rachel Klinghoffer, Denise Treizman, Carol Salmanson, and Anne Trauben. Their works incorporate painting, drawing, fiber, mixed media, found objects, LED lights, and more.
Each artist in “Material Wonder” explores Jewish identity through a distinctive material language, with an emphasis on joy, resilience, and mysticism. As artist Rachel Klinghoffer explains, “It’s very exciting to see the works physically presented together—to see the formal qualities, how they mirror off each other, and the different ways we are diving into our identities, Jewish symbolism, and the questions that we are asking through the materials. The colors and textures come together to create a needed, joyful source of identity.”
Rachel Klinghoffer standing beside her paintings.
South Orange-based Rachel Klinghoffer’s paintings and sculptures incorporate Jewish symbols and weave together memory, Jewish tradition, and pop culture. “We can hold dark, traumatic, heavy experiences—whether from our past, present, or what we anticipate in the future—but that also means there’s only room for the light to be brighter,” Klinghoffer reflects. “I want to engage with anyone that is making the world brighter.”
Klinghoffer’s sparkly canvases, thickly layered with deep blue and purple paint, feature images and symbols imbued with cultural significance. Her work incorporates Jewish symbols of protection, creativity, and luck, alongside found imagery. One painting prominently depicts Spock from Star Trek giving the Vulcan salute beneath a large Hebrew letter Shin (ש), referencing the gesture’s Jewish origins. Leonard Nimoy, the actor who played Spock, was of Ukrainian Jewish descent and adapted the salute from a priestly blessing he witnessed in an Orthodox synagogue. The letter Shin carries deep spiritual meaning, representing multiple words, including 'tooth,' 'change,' 'return,' and Shaddai (a name for God). 'This is a thread of Jewish culture running through global pop culture,' Klinghoffer notes. 'People associate the gesture with Spock’s slogan, Live long and prosper, usually without realizing its Jewish origins.' Through her work, she invites viewers to reconsider familiar imagery and uncover hidden layers of Jewish history embedded in secular pop culture.
Pesya Altman standing with her paintings. (Top) Skylight over Dreams, 2016, mixed media on canvas, 23 x 30 in. (Bottom) Map of a River, 2016, mixed media on canvas, 24 x 30 in.
New York City-based Pesya Altman’s work is deeply rooted in themes of displacement and cultural preservation. “I moved from my homeland of Israel to the United States 36 years ago, and I feel always, all the time, that I’m moving,” Altman shares. Many of her paintings resemble old maps, often incorporating personal objects as symbols of memory. “For two years, I was traveling and living out of one suitcase. When all the things you take with you can fit into one suitcase, it feels like that suitcase becomes home. The suitcase contains our hopes and our culture.”
For Altman, art is both an act of self-expression and a means of cultural survival. “As an immigrant, you can feel erased in many ways in the new culture. People don’t understand my culture, and it feels like parts of it disappear,” she explains. “I need to show people who I am. This is my world. I’m creating my world, and in a way, I am creating what I want around me.” Her work transforms the immigrant experience into a visual meditation on Jewish identity, belonging, and the power of carrying one’s heritage across time and space.
Carol Salmanson standing in front of her piece. Light spill 1 - back lights on and off, 26 H x 26 W x 6.75 in D, LEDs+reflective sheeting+ paint+plexi, 2020.
Brooklyn-based artist Carol Salmanson’s luminous light sculptures delve into the mystical aspects of illumination, drawing on the Kabbalistic idea of divine sparks scattered throughout the world. Working with light since 2003, she has developed a practice that emphasizes light’s transformative potential, using it both as a medium and as a metaphor for wisdom and transcendence.
Salmanson’s sculptures combine LED lights with laser-cut Plexiglas and reflective materials, such as repurposed road sign material embedded with tiny glass beads or prisms that reflect light directly back to its source. Collaborating with a local laser cutter in her Brooklyn studio, she meticulously designs radiant, geometric compositions inspired by the urban landscapes and architectural details of Brooklyn and Manhattan. Her pieces respond dynamically to different lighting environments—remaining distinct in bright ambient light while revealing unexpected color combinations in darkness, shifting the emotional and spiritual tone.
Anne Trauben standing beside her piece. Emergency map, if you need it, mixed media, 2025, part 1, 84 x 50. Including part 2, 7ft x 11 ft.
Hudson County-based artist and curator of Material Wonder, Anne Trauben incorporates Jewish ritual and family history into her work. The pieces in this exhibition were created in response to the events of October 7, 2023, the subsequent war, and the rise of global antisemitism. Within this context, Trauben’s art reflects an impulse to create and spread joy during challenging times.
Connecting to a family history of sewing, dressmaking, tailoring, craft-making, and a love of fashion, Trauben repurposes fabric remnants, beads, trimmings, and even a Mylar emergency blanket to transform unconventional materials into works that engage with Jewish mysticism and protective symbols such as the evil eye and the Hamsa. Using pom-poms, yarn, acrylic paint, beads, wire, paper, tin foil with melted Chanukah wax, T-pins, and colored map pins, she plays with dimensionality and design, pairing materials, patterns, textures, and shapes in unexpected combinations.
Trauben’s approach to materials allows her to create three-dimensional objects that she considers an extension of drawing and painting in space. Her work balances lightheartedness with deeper spiritual meaning, reflecting both resilience and the beauty of tradition. Some of her pieces, made directly on the wall, blur the line between art and environment, immersing viewers in her exploration of memory, history, and identity.
Denise Treizman pieces. (Left) Bright pink memoire, Handwoven balloons and vinyl on canvas, 9 x 11 in, 2024. (Right) Metallic grid, Handwoven balloons and vinyl on canvas, 9 x 11 in, 2023.
Miami-based Chilean-Israeli artist Denise Treizman infuses “Material Wonder” with playfulness, spontaneity, and a vibrant exploration of materiality. Known for transforming repurposed objects into dynamic compositions, Treizman embraces a process-driven approach, allowing materials to guide the outcome. In this exhibition, she presents a series of wall sculptures and works on paper that combine found objects, industrial remnants, and handcrafted elements, blurring the line between painting and sculpture.
Her works include a woven piece made from balloons and a shimmering sequin-covered sculpture embedded with a purple sneaker, exuding a sense of improvisation and unexpected juxtapositions. Her drawings, layered with foil, tape, and spray paint, extend this spirit of experimentation, incorporating textures and reflective surfaces that shift with light and movement. By embracing unconventional materials and playful compositions, Treizman invites viewers to reconsider the beauty and potential within discarded materials. She challenges traditional ideas of permanence and value while offering an expressive approach to Jewish identity and cultural narratives.
Complementing “Material Wonder” is a special installation in Drawing Room’s Alcove Gallery Corridor: “Hatikvah Sticker Collective: A Global Movement Stickering for the Hostages and Jewish Civil Rights.” Since October 7, 2023, this grassroots movement has transformed simple address labels into a creative form of advocacy, using stickers to call for the release of hostages in Gaza, to protest antisemitism, and to raise awareness of Jewish civil rights.
By repurposing a simple, everyday material, the collective turns city streets into canvases for solidarity and remembrance. “Anyone with $100 can cover a whole neighborhood,” says Hatikvah member Alisha Fine. “With just black and white stickers, we create a visible message of resistance and hope.”
Together, “Material Wonder” and “Hatikvah Sticker Collective” celebrate the profound ways that materials—from fabric and paint to light and stickers—can be used to express Jewish identity, preserve memory, and spread messages of resilience, joy, and hope.
Visiting Hours and Upcoming Programming: Material Wonder: Jewish Joy and Mysticism in 2025 is on view at Drawing Rooms through April 5, 2025. Gallery hours are Thursdays and Fridays from 4–7 PM, and Saturdays and Sundays from 2–6 PM. An artist panel discussion is scheduled for Sunday, March 9, from 3–5 PM.
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