Social Justice Artist

Shoshana Gugenheim Kedem is an American/Israeli interdisciplinary artist, Torah scribe, curator and chutzpanit. She reimagines rituals and sacred objects, primarily but not solely, Jewish ones, and reinserts them, with new forms, into familiar contexts.  Her large scale collaborations engage institutional critique as a practice of new imaginaries while redistributing agency to the public domain, often through publicly generated solutions.

Shoshana was one of the first women in modern times to train and practice as a Torah scribe. She led the scribing of two Torah scrolls written collectively and exclusively by women. Her scribal work inspired her international Jewish women artists collaboration, Women of the Book, launched with the Jerusalem Biennale 2015 and acquired as a limited edition print set by the Yale University Arts Library Collection and other private collectors. Today her work as a scribe manifests through Or Hadash | עור חדש , an art in(ter)vention into the contemporary parchment making industry, offering an alternative to the current reliance on industrial agriculture and re-turning production of parchment to the land, the people, and the animals they tend.

Shoshana is the Co-Founder and Director of Art/Lab a Contemporary Jewish Artists Fellowship in Portland, OR. She is the founding Artist and Co-Curator of the Greensboro Contemporary Jewish Museum and its Social Practice Institute for Southern Jewish Artists in Greensboro, NC.  Shoshana lives with her partner and children in a NE neighborhood of Portland, OR where she directs and curates the Gugenheim Portland situated in their family residence. Shoshana speaks, teaches and consults internationally.

Visit Shoshana’s website at www.shoshanagugenheim.com

The Social Justice Artist position is supported by the Weisbard Hollander Social Justice Fund.

Shoshana’s class on Narratives of Emergence is full, but you can join the waitlist when you register. She’ll also be leading some other community-wide programming.