Philadelphia Museum of Jewish Art Exhibit
REIMAGINED: Masterpieces of Art with Jewish Imagery
By Esty Frankel-Fersel
Free and open to the public
December 2016- March 2017
The Philadelphia Museum of Jewish Art is pleased to present an exhibit by Esty Frankel-Fersel, a talented artist with a great sense of humor. Esty came up with the idea of adding an image of a family performing the Tashlich ceremony to Monet’s famous “Bridge over a Pond of Water Lillies.” This led to more converted paintings and to her ultimate accumulation of over 60 works of art with Jewish twists and Yiddish expressions through the arts and to the publication of Converted Masters.
Esty Frankel-Fersel was born in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. She attended Bais Yacov through high school with a year of seminary in Israel.
*About the image: American Gothic is an iconic portrait of farm life in America in a simpler time. The artist has replaced the pitchfork with a palm frond (lulav) while the wife is holding the citron (etrog). They are dressed in traditional Jewish garb, with the temporary dwelling, the sukkah behind them. Sukkot to the agrarian Jew, represented the completion of the harvest season, a time of great joy, but also a time of recognition of the fragility and transience of life, a fact which is not lost on this somber couple.
