Category: News & Articles

General ASWM news and organizational updates

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Announcing Scholar Salon 11: Register for August 12th

 PRIESTESSING EARTH-BASED RITUALS IN MODERN JEWISH LIFE
with Sarah Chandler

Wednesday, August 12, 2020
3 pm Eastern Daylight Time 

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Kohenet Sarah Chandler and friend

Modern Jewish priestesses are reviving ancient rituals based on the elements and cycles of the earth.  We will explore ancient texts connected to the Jewish calendar, applying them to modern agriculture and sustainability. We will discuss creative ways to gather in community to take part in earth-based Jewish ritual in all seasons. Whether you’re looking to gather in community on a monthly basis or connected to a holiday, participants will learn skills to craft Jewish rituals aligning them to any season or climate.

Sarah Chandler, aka Kohenet Shamirah, is a Brooklyn-based Jewish educator, ritualist, artist, activist, and poet. Currently, she is the program director of Romemu Yeshiva and a garden educator with Grow Torah. She teaches, writes, and consults on issues related to Jewish earth-based spiritual practice, farming, and mindfulness. Sarah is also a member of the ASWM Board of Directors.

Save these dates for upcoming Salons

August 26 at 3 pm  Eastern Daylight Time
The MASKS OF THE GODDESS Project
Lauren Raine

Sept 23 at 3 pm  Eastern Daylight Time
Redeeming Ancient Agriculture from the Dustbin
Vicki Noble

October 7 at 3pm Eastern Daylight Time
Call Your Mutha’: A Deliberately Dirty-Minded Manifesto for the Earth Mother in the Anthropocene
Jane Caputi, PhD

Benefit of Membership - ASWM

Continue reading “Announcing Scholar Salon 11: Register for August 12th”

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Remembering the Work of Judith Anderson

This article recently came to our attention. Judith was a wonderful visionary artist  of archetypes of women and nature, who passed away in 2008. (Our thanks to Lauren Raine and Max Dashu for the reference.) The Encyclopedia of  Women in World Religions: Faith and Culture Across History says that Judith “used womb/vagina imagery explicitly as devotional work dedicated to the goddess.”

In the Dark Speech of Praise and Birth:  The Prints of Judith Anderson 

by Catherine Madsen

“Missa Gaia: This is My Body,” Judith Anderson, etching, 1988

Describing her process of printmaking, Judith said,

“The germ of the idea for a particular print develops over many months or sometimes years. Images from reading, dreams, relationships, pictures, plants and animals will gather and cluster until a beginning form for the print emerges. The main image grows and changes, often in surprising ways, during the long process of working on the plate, which may be several months. Only some time after a print is finished do I come to understand intuitively more about its origins and implications.”  (from Art of the Print website)

Here as well is artist Alicia Blaze Hunsicker’s blog post about Judith.

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Scholar Salon with Simone Clunie

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Wednesday July 29, 2020
3 pm Eastern Daylight time

The Representation of Goddess Imagery
in Feminist Art
Oshun Praise Song II, by AfraShe Asungi

For millennia, the goddess figure made its way through the mythologies of First Peoples and through women’s histories. In the Western traditions of major (masculinist) Abrahamic religions, the archetype of a/the goddess has become eclipsed by a solo male god head. In the rising of the Second Wave of the western feminist movement of the 60s in (New World) countries like the USA and the United Kingdom, female artists started looking at a female create-tress, inspire by various traditional goddess mythologies, as the first source of worship. The iconography of the goddess also became another way to peel away the layers of patriarchal thought (and religion) and to interpret female embodiment and energy as a priori site of/for creation.  Artists began to pay reverence to the spirit/creation and its interconnectedness to/within nature. They introduce the goddess presence through re-confirming pagan based practices like Wicca and Dianic witchcraft, the calling on of the African traditions of Yoruba and Vodun, and reframing Christian tradition within a woman’s theology.

God Giving Birth by Monica Sjoo

As a ceramic artist, my work has been influenced by this time and train of thought, and moving through a trajectory of the social influences of the 1960s and onwards that informed the feminist (art historical) thinking of various female artists, I will look at how goddess mythologies have informed individual/specific works of Ana Mendieta (Cuba/USA), AfraShe Asungi (USA), Monica Sjoo (Sweden/UK), Mary Beth Edelson (USA), Robyn Kahukiwa, (Aotearoa/New Zealand), Mayumi Oda (Japan/USA), Yolanda Lopez (Mexico/USA), Sutapa Biswas (India/UK), Nancy Spero (USA), and Vivian Lynn (Aotearoa/New Zealand).

Green Tara by Mayumi Oda

Simone Clunie is an artist who works as a librarian and lives in Pennsylvania. Moving to the USA from Jamaica in the mid-eighties she found out she had an affinity for clay and earned a BFA in the Visual Arts from Florida International University in Miami. A feminist conceptual framework is the impetus for the work she focuses on, primarily using the female body as a metaphoric container for/of magic and women’s mythology.

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Scholar Salon 7

ASWM Scholar Salon 7 with Annie Finch "Poetic Rhythm and the Goddess", moderated by Kathryn Henderson, PhD. Wednesday, June 24, 2020 live event.

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Scholar Salon with Starr Goode and Cristina Biaggi

Wednesday, July 15 3:00-4:30 Eastern Daylight Time

“The Civilization of the Vulva”

A new spirit stirs the consciousness of our times. Women are reclaiming the vulva as an icon of primal creative energy. Unbounded by time or space, this sacred image can be found in uncountable representations from Paleolithic caves to Sheela na gigs to pink pussy hats. The startling image of a female displaying her sex can be seen in the visual and narrative arts all over the planet. So rooted in our psyches is this image, it seems as if the icon of the vulva is the original cosmological center of the human imagination and a basis of civilization. 

The Web—the patterns that connects—is a primary symbol of women’s mysteries. Found in Paleolithic and Neolithic art, it connects back to the vulva from which it all began. In its latest manifestation, the Web has come to symbolize women’s movements for peace and justice during the 80s and 90s of the last century. It has inspired what we continue to experience—art dedicated to feminism, peace and environmental issues.

 

Starr Goode, MA, teaches writing and literature at Santa Monica College. Producer and moderator for the cable TV series, The Goddess in Art is available on YouTube. Her latest essay, “Adventures She Has Brought My Way” appears in Elders and Visionaries Anthology. Her latest book, Sheela na gig: the Dark Goddess of Sacred Power, won the 2018 Sarasvati Award for Best Non-Fiction Book presented by the Association for the Study of Women and Mythology. www.starrgoode.com 

Cristina Biaggi is primarily an artist and has exhibited her work in Europe, the United States and Australia. She’s also a writer and a lecturer and has written 4 books on Women Spirituality, Prehistory and the Great Goddess. In addition to her artistic and literary pursuits, Biaggi is also a mountain climber, a Fifth degree Black Belt in the Korean martial art of Tae Kwon Do, and a Black Sash in Shaolin Kung Fu.