By Andrew Adler
Community Editor
L-R: Felice Sachs and Natalie Polzer (Photo by Andrew. Adler)
If you venture up to the second floor of the University of Louisville’s Ekstrom Library and find your way to the Susan and William Yarmuth Jewish Studies Reading Room, you’ll spot a pair of display cases bearing works by fiber artist Felice Koloms Sachs.
A longtime member of the local Jewish community, Sachs – who holds a master’s degree in art from U of L — is the inaugural participant in an exhibition series titled Louisville Jewish Artists Today. The Chicago native, a former neonatal intensive care nurse who’s lived in Louisville for more than 50 years, has long been fascinated with the act of reevaluating, repurposing, and ultimately transforming.
“I think of myself as a maker – I make things!” she says, a simple statement that belies the myriad layers of her creative process.
Take, for instance, an “avenue of practice and interest I have gone down: using loved ones’ clothing to create useful or wall hung art.,” Sachs says. “People hang onto clothing of their dead loved ones sometimes, but don’t quite know what to do with them.
“I have been involved in many of these requests,” she explains – “For example, a mother’s blouse sewn onto a tallit. And then making a ‘portrait’ of other clothes of this same mother, sewn and stretched as a wall hanging — à la Alma Lesch — the sort of mother of fiber art in Kentucky, known for her portraits made with clothes and other relevant artifacts, without the face or other body features.”
Sachs’s husband of 57 years, Bob Sachs, has been a prime source both of inspiration and, literally, material: “Cutting up and using (his) sweaters, flannel shirts and gardening jeans to create three small lap blankets,” or “repurposing casual knit and woven shirt parts into a five-foot-wide wall hanging.”
The pieces making up the current Ekstrom exhibit are exercises in comparative miniature – necessary to fit the display cases’ modest dimensions. In Echoes of Tea Time an ordinary placemat morphs into a lace-covered hand about to pour a libation into a waiting cup, while snippets of text (Do you take sugar…Yes please) circle the images below. Patchwork Family takes a throw pillow, overlaying a vintage black-and-white photograph of unidentified members of the artist’s family centered among machine and hand stitched fabric squares.
“A lot of things are what I call ‘multi-processing’” Sachs says, “because there’s one more than one process in it. It might have painting, stenciling, appliqué fabrics and lots of stitching, and the addition of other embellishments like beads or embroidery.”
The only rules are that there are no rules.
“I think that in any kind of art project…as you’re working, your mind has its own opinion,” Sachs believes. “It says, ‘Well, did you try that? Have you? Won’t you try this?’ You start out with an idea, and sometimes it’s collecting little bits of fabric that you might not want to use, or colors that you might want to use in threads or paint or stenciling. But as you work on it, other things develop. You think, ‘Well, it needs something different here in that corner. It needs a color that I haven’t thought about before.’ The work itself takes charge and carries you along.”
Meanwhile, is a Jewish artist necessarily bound up in Jewish themes? To a degree, Sachs acknowledges, but not inevitably. She’s incorporated the Hebrew letters “Ayin” and “Shin” – the former (the first letter of the Aleph-Bet) representing a beginning. In a work she recalls titling along the lines of “Shattering Peace,” “‘Shin’ is the first letter of ‘Shalom’ – and I broke it up.”
This exhibit of Sachs’s works, which runs through March 1, is acting as a kind of test bed for an ongoing showcase of Jewish artists working in Louisville. Series coordinator is Natalie Polzer, Associate Professor of Jewish Studies and Religious Studies in the Department of Comparative Humanities.
“I’d like to use this opportunity, because there might be people who – if they want their work to be featured, can contact me,” Polzer says. “Then we can arrange for them to send photos” of pieces that might be appropriate to include.
The goal, Polzer adds, “is to display the various kinds of creativity we have in our community. I think it’s important to show how Jews are involved in different cultural endeavors in Louisville.”
U of L is a natural locus for such a project, offering insight to faculty, staff and students alike. “Already I’ve had students say, ‘Look at that work in the library – whose is it?’
The school boasts multiple examples of works by Jewish artists – one of the late surgeon Harold Berg’s mosaics can be seen on the second floor of the Bingham Humanities Building. “Students pass by that all the time,” Polzer says. “There’s a tiny little marker, but I don’t think anybody reads it, so it’s not explicitly identified as a Jewish image of some sort.”
Showcasing Jewish artists, Polzer says, can help broaden perspectives of students who may have grown up in parts of Kentucky where “they’ve never met Jews before.” Indeed, she emphasizes how “it’s important for me to represent the Jewish community in a way that’s extremely positive, that stretches the image of what Jews are and do.”
Whose works might be exhibited after Sachs’s run closes? Polzer doesn’t want to name names quite yet, though she has several in mind.
Meanwhile, Sachs is implicitly acknowledging family connections that reach back over artistic and temporal time.
“My paternal grandmother was an excellent seamstress, making her children’s clothes as they grew up,” Sachs writes in an artist’s statement.
“I was always curious about her treadle sewing machine housed in a closet. I learned to knit at 10 and received my first sewing machine at 13. My first sewing class was at the Sears store where my father worked as a salesman in the furniture department. That was back when most department stores sold yard goods. The pleasure and inspiration from pattern, color and texture is still with me.”
Art, she believes, can be conduit to a saner, more responsible world.
“In a small way I feel I am participating in conservation and reducing waste by reusing and repurposing a bit of our resources,” she says. “Working with textiles as art and their other practical uses provides a creative outlet and perspective – a happy place. I look forward to continue participating, learning and creating for the rest of my life.”
