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Artist Leah Caroline on view at Slifka Center at Yale

Spring Awaking: An Exhibition of Cyanotype prints on Nature, Memory, and Birth

Allen and Leah Rabinowitz Gallery
Joseph Slifka Center for Jewish Life at Yale
80 Wall Street, 2nd Floor, New Haven, CT
Tel (203) 432-1134

Opening: Thursday, March 27, 4-6 PM

Leah’s work incorporates natural imagery and Hebrew text from Song of Songs, a poetic text with many references to nature and traditionally read during Passover. The artist uses a nineteenth century photographic printing process strongly related to the natural sciences and blueprints, and reminiscent of the ephemerality of nature, dreams, and memories. 


Part of the process involves placing plant materials onto sensitized paper, exposing the paper to sunlight, and developing in water. The resultant image is a trace memory of the object placed on the paper. The blurred letters of the Hebrew text are not always readable, and many viewers will not understand Hebrew. The letters acquire meanings beyond their literal translations. They become visual symbols for the viewers’ personal meanings, understandings, and experiences. Connected into scrolls—the ancient form of Song of Songs—the ethereal blue prints become intertwined memories of past, present, beginning and end. 

Exhibition hours: March 27th through April 30th, 9-5, or by appointment.

This exhibition coincides with Passover, the “Festival of Spring”, and the holiday when we traditionally read Song of Songs.  

On March 30th at 1 PM, there will be cyanotype workshop with the artist where participants will learn first hand how to make cyanotypes. 1st Floor of the Slifka Center at Yale, RSVP to Lucy Partman at lucy.partman@yale.edu

“I have come to my garden,” Large Scroll Installation,
cyanotype and mixed media on Japanese papers, 2013

About the Artist:  Leah Caroline received her BFA from Lyme Academy College of Fine Arts in Old Lyme, Connecticut. Caroline works with a variety of media--in particular, cyanotype printing, photography, and digital media. She makes large scrolls with the cyanotypes, and creates installations with her work. Caroline has been included in regional exhibits, including solo exhibitions. Caroline has written and illustrated for Chabad.org, including “art journals” for the site. She is the founder and artist teacher of the Connecticut Artists’ Beit Midrash and leads art workshops.  

The Joseph Slifka Center for Jewish Life at Yale: Among the premiere campus Jewish centers in the world, the Slifka Center offers programs of breadth, depth and centrality to campus life, Jewish and non-Jewish. Through the Slifka Center, Jewish life at Yale is woven into the natural rhythm of the campus, and harnesses the innovative thinking and intellectual rigor of the university. Slifka Center sees an opportunity to offer complementary programs that can engage, educate, provoke and inspire students through a Jewish lens. 

Slifka Arts: An undergraduate organization under the direction of Slifka’s Director of Operations, CHINO, and head arts curator Lucy Partman, a senior undergraduate majoring in history of art and biology at Yale, Slifka Arts has transformed the Slifka Center into a dynamic gallery of many new and rotating exhibitions. It is an extraordinary opportunity for student curators to run a gallery and bring art by artists on campus and beyond to the Slifka community, as well as the Yale and New Haven communities at large.



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