Resident Artist: Anonymous No More: Carol Hamoy's Visible Women

Abstract

American artist Carol Hamoy belongs to the growing number of Jewish feminist artists who are addressing biblical themes in visual art.1 For Hamoy, recovering the histories and lives of women has been the central focus of a long and productive career. Her multimedia installation The Invisible Part of the Children of Israel was a centerpiece of MATRONITA, an exhibition of international Jewish feminist art presented by the Museum of Art in Ein Harod, Israel, last year. Most of the artists in that exhibit engaged with and provoked critical examination of Orthodox practice and belief. Hamoy’s exceptional piece instead evokes the ancient past and its imprint upon our consciousness. Indeed, it reshapes that imprint. The Invisible Part of the Children of Israel is emblematic of Hamoy’s meticulous scholarly research and carefully honed skills as an assemblage sculptor/seamstress. “Anonymous was a woman,” goes the feminist dictum, and this complex work, deceptively simple in presentation, makes that truism explicit. It does so by training a brilliantly nuanced lens on what is missing. Hamoy calls herself “a storyteller and an educator.” In evoking stories of women while simultaneously referencing the womanly arts of sewing and needlework, she has been well served by her family’s background in the New York City garment industry