Women's Studies Research Center

"Occupy Sanhedrin"

On View: March 29 - May 18, 2012

Sarah Zell Young

Hadassah-Brandeis Institute Artist-in-Residence and Exhibit

"As Old as the World," 2011

On March 12, 2012, the Kniznick Gallery at Brandeis University's Women's Studies Research Center (WSRC) welcomed the fourth annual Hadassah-Brandeis Institute (HBI) Artist in Residence, Sarah Zell Young. The HBI residency provides artists the opportunity to be in residence at Brandeis University for up to one month while working on a significant artistic project in the field of Jewish women's and gender studies.

Young is an artist working in several media — photography, sculpture, installation and film — to explore issues of justice, Judaism and the body. Her exhibition for the WSRC/HBI, "Occupy Sanhedrin," will examine roles — both religious and secular — for Jewish women from the Second Temple to the present and will explore how bodies can become hazarded in the pursuit of justice. In addition to photographs, the exhibition will feature a large, site-specific installation — an interactive and participatory rendition of a Sanhedrin (rabbinic court). By granting access to an historical space of justice — making it physical — Young invites viewers to engage with traditional ideas and received wisdom of judicatory in a new way and to achieve personal agency over their own relationship to history.

Visit the gallery between March 12 and March 29 to view the exhibition in progress and interact with the artist.

Sarah Zell Young received her BFA in Sculpture from the Rhode Island School of Design and is studying toward her MFA in Combined Media from Hunter College, New York. In addition to her art studies, she has studied modern Hebrew at both Brown University and Tel Aviv University. Young has exhibited her work at many galleries in New England and New York, as well as internationally, and has completed residencies at the Vermont Studio Center and Drisha Institute for Jewish Education. She has curated exhibitions and delivered lectures on issues related to religion, feminism and the body, including a 2011 presentation at the University of Wisconsin titled "Making it Meaningful: Feminism, Body Art and Talmudic Text Study."