Spiritual Ties

A year and a half ago, curator Judith Hoffberg ventured onto the Internet and began the exhaustive culling process for an exhibition with a specific focus. Hoffberg wanted to gather book-oriented art by Jewish women, and the resulting “Women of the Book: Jewish Artists, Jewish Themes” at the Finegood Gallery is a substantial and diverse show, including 90 artists from many countries.

The collected work conveys the variety of approaches to contemporary book art, from the narrative to the sculptural. The common denominator is an adherence to Jewish themes and a questioning of cultural identity in art that refers to the lingering pain of the Holocaust, the difficulties of Jewish life in America and treasured aspects of Jewish tradition.

Gaza Bowen’s piece, co-opting the style of children’s books, intertwines memories of her own childhood and the story of Anne Frank’s life in hiding. A poignant visit to the concentration camp ruins of Buchenwald inspired Lisa Kokin’s “Six Books,” and Joyce Cutler Shaw considers the Nazi terror in symbolic terms with “The Stones of Dachau.”

With “Survival,” 80-year-old artist Miriam Beerman shows some of the most vivid and, we’re tempted to say, “youngest” work, blending testimonies and drawings with graffiti-like flamboyance. Using surprising elements of mixed media, Sylvia Glass decorates Bibles in ways that change the context of the religious book. Other book art in the gallery challenges assumptions about what makes a book a book.

One of the highlights, Rose-Lynn Fisher’s “Inside,” is cryptically elegant: a handmade book with infra-red photographs of pomegranates, the enigmatic fruit. Actual matzos are among the materials in Barbara Drucker’s “Evidence of Passover,” and Jo-Ann Brody’s “Book of Women” is a three-dimensional sculptural redefinition of “bookishness.”

The Finegood Gallery is the first stop of the traveling show, a successful examination of book art and Jewish self-examination. It’s also a tribute to the power of the Internet.

BE THERE

“Women of the Book,” through Saturday at Finegood Art Gallery, West Valley Jewish Community Center, 22622 Vanowen St., West Hills. Gallery hours: noon-4 p.m. today and Friday; 1-4 p.m. Saturday; (818) 587-3255.