Mikvehs And Mushrooms: Nicki Green And Liora Ostroff

"I think that any kind of engagement with transness and Jewishness feels exciting to me...It actually feels like not just a trans practice, but actually quite a queer practice, of not seeing yourself reflected in the world around you, and so needing to look deeply, creatively at that world to interpret what you're seeing as queer."

-Nicki Green

As part of our ongoing series on the art exhibit A Fence Around The Torah we're joined by Nicki Green for a conversation on ceramics, trans and queer mikveh, or water immersion, rituals, and the symbolic meanings of mushrooms and fermentation.

Nicki Green is a transdisciplinary artist working primarily in clay. Her sculptures, ritual objects and various flat works explore topics of history preservation, conceptual ornamentation, and the aesthetics of otherness. Green lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area but is currently a resident artist at Cal State Long Beach.

Liora Ostroff is Curator-in-Residence at the Jewish Museum of Maryland, where she curated A Fence Around The Torah. She's a painter whose work explores themes like queerness, Jewishness, violence, and the idiosyncrasies of life in Baltimore.

Transcript

Mark Gunnery: Disloyal is a podcast committed to a broad representation of thought, ideas, and creative imaginings. The opinions expressed by guests on this podcast do not necessarily represent the opinions of the staff, management, board, or volunteers of the Jewish Museum of Maryland.

Nicki Green:I think that any engagement with transness and Jewishness feels exciting to me. I think that there is very little of it and it actually feels... I would say, not just a trans practice, but actually quite a queer practice of not seeing yourself reflected in the world around you, and so needing to look deeply, creatively at that world to interpret what you're seeing as queer.

Mark Gunnery: Welcome to Disloyal, a podcast from the Jewish Museum of Maryland. I'm your host, Mark Gunnery. Today on the show, we're continuing our series on A Fence Around The Torah, the Jewish Museum of Maryland's latest contemporary art exhibit. It explores how Jewish communities navigate the concepts of safety and unsafety in traditional, contemporary and futuristic ways. I'm speaking with the artist and curators who made the exhibit possible. You can experience the art from this exhibit at afencearoundthetorah.com. And today I'm joined by Nicki Green. Nicki Green is a transdisciplinary artist working primarily in clay. Her sculptures, ritual objects and various flat works explore topics of history preservation, conceptual ornamentation and the aesthetics of otherness.

Green has exhibited her work internationally and contributed text to numerous publications, including Transgender Studies Quarterly and Fermenting Feminism, Copenhagen. In 2019 Green was a finalist for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Arts SECA Award, a recipient of an arts industry residency from the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, among other awards. Green lives and works in the San Francisco Bay area, but is currently a resident artist at Cal State, Long Beach. Nicki Green's contribution to A Fence Around The Torah is called Sabbath Crock, and it invokes both mikvehs, or Jewish water immersion rituals, and fermentation. Nicki Green, thank you so much for joining us.

Nicki Green: Thanks so much for having me.

Mark Gunnery: I'm also joined by Liora Ostroff. Liora Ostroff is curator-in-residence here at the Jewish Museum of Maryland, where she curated A Fence Around The Torah. She is a painter whose work explores themes like queerness, Jewishness, violence and the idiosyncrasies of life in Baltimore. Liora Ostroff, thank you for joining us.

Liora Ostroff: Thank you, Mark.

Mark Gunnery: Nicki Green, I want to start with you. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your art practice?

Nicki Green: Sure. So I'm an artist and I like to use the language transdisciplinary, because I primarily work in sculpture and three-dimensional forms. I identify as an object maker, but I do a lot of work two dimensionally, I do a lot of drawing and painting that I think both informs the sculptural work, but also is a practice or are practices, autonomously. So I like to work in a lot of mediums, across mediums and I tend to look at a lot of, I would say, Jewish history, Jewish practice, Jewish mythology, as a reference point, as well as queer cultural material. And for me, as a queer trans Jewish person, I'm really interested in the ways that these identities and these ways of being in the world intersect with each other. And so I think my practice or my practices are about exploring the ways that these, what felt like, for a lot of my life, disparate identities, intersect and inform one another.

And so I really, I think, as an adult, entered, I like to say back into a relationship with my Jewish identity and practice, through art making and through object making in particular, and was just really thinking a lot about the ritual objects that I grew up with and the significance of ritual practice, but also the tools that allow us to engage with those rituals, and to really consider what ritual objects might look like if they were being produced for queer and trans Jews explicitly.

Mark Gunnery: The piece you submitted to A Fence Around The Torah is titled Sabbath Crock. Can you describe what it is, what it looks like, and why you wanted it to be in this exhibit?

Nicki Green: Sure. So Sabbath Crock is a fermentation crock, and when I had originally been asked to produce a Shabbat ritual object by the Contemporary Jewish Museum of San Francisco... This was many years ago, they have a series of invitationals around ritual objects and the production of new ritual objects... I started to think about what a queer Shabbat ritual might look like, and for a long time I was doing a lot of research and thinking through fermentation as this queer ritual, this queer practice, specifically this idea that the transformation inside of a fermentation crop is this alchemical magical practice where vegetables like cucumbers or like cabbage are being transformed into these living, bubbly, sparkly fermented foods. And there was something that felt very queer about that, that interest alongside this formative relationship with deli culture, growing up in the Boston area and spending a lot of time in New York and just these rich, east coast, Jewish communities, pickles and fermented foods felt really significant to me.

So in a conceptual sense, ferment as a Shabbat ritual felt exciting and felt like an interesting way to fold transformation into a Shabbat practice that is really about rest and engaging with slowness and repair and relaxation and what does it mean to include, not just the... say richness of challah... but to bring in the magicalness, the sparkliness, the queerness of pickles into that. So I kept thinking, could I create a crock that was specifically meant for Shabbat pickles that could, say, ferment all week and then be opened on Shabbat to enjoy and revel in the deliciousness and magic of fermentation.

So the object itself is a cylindrical vessel that sits on top of a cylindrical base and has these protruding, almost spouts, that stick out from the underside, which is a reference to another interest of mine, which is Delftware and the ornately painted domestic object, domestic ceramic object, and specifically the tulip ear form, which is this vessel that is really there to not hold a bundle of flowers, like a vase would, but to actually separate stems, individual stems of flowers, and look at the specificity of, in a Dutch sense, the tulip.

And there's something to me, I think, formally, that feels really exciting about the separation of flowers and the repetition of spouts as a ceramic anatomical feature. And so this base has these spouts, the texture is this goopy, fungusy cellular texture, which is another interest of mine. Fungus and mushrooms are an avenue of research that I'm really interested in and so hybridizing the fermentation vessel with fungus felt really exciting.

And then on the exterior of vessel is a concentric painting of a figure of a... I would say... androgynous figure that is walking down into water and then walking back up out of water and then walking back down into water and back up, this repetition and circularity of immersion. And I think a lot of the work I do is anchored in a real interesting commitment with mikveh, with bathing and ablution rituals, across religious practices, but, in my case, I'm Jewish and so that's the most immediate relationship to mikveh, so pairing or folding fermentation into bodily immersion felt interesting, exciting. I think it still feels fascinating to me. I don't know that I'm settled on it, but to me, that's the point of the work, is to propose these connections.

Mark Gunnery: Liora, I want to turn to you. You are featuring Sabbath Crock in the queer life section of A Fence Around The Torah. First, can you remind us about the questions you were trying to ask with the queer life section and how do you see Nicki Green's work responding to them?

Liora Ostroff: So I think one implicit question in the exhibition was what are the different types of safety that we're discussing? Because besides physical unsafety, these artists also discussed emotional and psychological safety and safety as a sense of secure belonging. And two of the questions that both Green and Ladin addressed in their work were... How does unsafety and exclusion affect personal relationships with Judaism and Jewish community, and how do we imagine the Jewish future and safety for marginalized people? And I think that both Green and Ladin approach these questions from a place of strength. Nicki Green describes her ceramic work as carving out space for trans Jews, imagining how ritual or everyday objects can reflect trans experience, and as she writes... What these objects might look like if they were designed for our bodies explicitly. And I think that her queer ritual objects do two things, they address the extent to which trans people have been excluded from how we imagine Jewish life, and they also participate in the expansive project of re-imagining Jewish life and ritual for marginalized bodies and marginalized identities.

So I see Nicki as part of a growing movement of Jewish artists who reassess ritual objects for present times and for complex identities, including other artists in this exhibition, such as Arielle Tonkin and Val Schlosberg. And I think that the same movement includes writers who reimagine liturgy, ritual leaders who adapt Jewish observants and scholars who elicit new understandings of foundational texts and stories.

Mark Gunnery: I want to zoom into part of that, because you said that one of the focuses of the queer life section is how unsafety and exclusion affect personal relationships within Judaism and Jewish communities. Why did you think it was important to bring in that element of personal relationships into this exhibit?

Liora Ostroff: Because the personal is political and this is a deeply political exhibit, which I can't deny. And when we're talking about any of the topics discussed in this exhibit, like political dissent or racial profiling or intergenerational dialogues, et cetera, we are making it personal. And that's also the purpose of showing art. I think that artists can take these big topics and show us a very personal lens, an individual human being's experience, and that's powerful. That's a powerful way to address these questions.

Nicki Green: I think that there's also something quite profound in considering the relationship of text as a reclamation. It makes me think a lot about how, as a... say... progressive Jew, or a Jewish person who's looking both at historical text, but also really digging into translation and evolution of those same texts and the working through and driving forward conversation around text, it really makes me think about how translation is, as a practice, is a shifting, transforming, almost a curatorial practice of changing something and reinterpreting it. I think that, when I consider the work that I'm doing, it feels like it's about translating something in looking at a historical object, a historical practice and then evolving it or driving it forward into a different space and thinking about it as it might be considered through the lens of queerness or transness.

And I'm thinking a lot about how, as an artist, as a visual artist, I'm indebted to the writers and the creative people who are engaging text creatively. So somebody who pops up in my mind, maybe aside from the brilliant, brilliant, inspiring Joy Ladin, Andrew Ramer is somebody who I'm incredibly inspired by. And I actually think his work of queer midrash, this queer interpretation of biblical text, really inspired the way in which I think about the power and ownership I have over ritual practice, ritual object, and really my own Jewish practice to see midrash as this really subversive way of engaging text and driving it forward, driving it into a new shape and form. And I think that that power, that empowerment, self empowerment, and hopefully empowering of others to do the same is what, for me, creates that level of safety. It's about accessing some ownership and control and ability to feel engaged with the subject.

Liora Ostroff: That's great because I was going to ask you who inspires you, and also I like to make paintings that I think of as visual midrash, so I love that.

Nicki Green: I think that that's really exciting and I think midrash is such a important part of Jewish text engagement. Midrash is this active engagement with text, this pulling apart and exploring a text creatively, and Andrew Ramer's work, I think, across the board, has felt really inspiring to me. And he, in particular, worked on the Sha'ar Zahav Siddur, which is pretty huge around progressive and also gender inclusive and queer inclusive Siddur production and liturgy production. And when I first encountered that text or that series of text, I reached out to him asking his reference points. There was language that I found really exciting, particularly using language like "the well of life", "well of life" as a gender neutral God language.

And I reached out to him to ask about it because I found it really moving and inspiring in that I had this budding interest in queer and trans mikveh rituals. And so he directed me to Marsha Fuchs who had been using and working with this idea of the well, or the well of life as this gender neutral God concept. And from there, I think, my research just flowered, expanded outwards and was really pivotal in my research.

Mark Gunnery: I want to ask you more about mikvehs, because in your artist statement, you write "The mikveh focus work that I make is about carving out space for trans Jews and ritual practice, considering both why washing rituals are so attractive to trans Jews, but also what these objects might look like if they were designed for our body explicitly". Can you speak a little bit more about that connection between trans Jews and washing rituals?

Nicki Green: Sure. So I was first introduced to trans-specific mikveh ritual through a piece of liturgy and the ritual design by Max Strassfeld and Elliot Kukla called A Mikveh Ritual for Trans Related Surgery or any other transition, and I use that ritual in a gender transition related moment in time in my own life, but I think that that specific ritual that I found via TransTorah, the organization TransTorah, really initiated this conversation for me around why is mikveh a thing that trans Jews are actively working with and attempting to reclaim and utilizes a way to affirm our bodies, affirm our Jewishness, mark a point in time. I have a lot of ideas of why that might be, I obviously can't speak for other trans Jews, but for me, my understanding is, in one sense it's about water, water as this liminal transformational material that water exists as this fluid, flowing, evolving material.

And so in the case of mikveh also space that water is holding or creating space, and by immersing in water, we're breaking the surface of the water, this schism or transitional space, but also the fact that mikveh, historically, is used both to... sure, purify the body, but also, say in more progressive circles, used to, say mark, a transitional moment. So I think that a lot of what queer and trans Jews are looking at with mikveh is a history or a relationship to conversion rituals, specifically converting to Judaism, that there's this immersion as a marking of time and space to enter this womb-like environment, and then to break the surface again, as a new person, is a really, I think, profound way to engage something as life giving and universal as water.

And for me, when I was doing some early research, I was looking at images of the mikveh space and thinking about the tiled interior, and as somebody who's been studying ceramics for a long time, had this revelatory understanding that mikveh, a tiled mikveh is in the language of ceramics, a tile is a ceramic material. And so I felt like I had another access point to this ritual that I could think about it through the lens of the material practice that I study.

And so I began to explore it as an object, though I think, in a lot of Halakhic literature material discussion, the objectness of the mikveh is actually a contentious point, that it's meant to be built into the architecture of the space or ideally a natural environment that the origin of the mikveh is a flowing source of water. So the fact that it's been contained in an interior architectural spaces is only an evolution of plumbing and the containment of the water and so actually my relationship with mikveh is only in relationship to outdoor, natural sources, because I feel, as a trans person, it's a really precarious position to enter into a space that is so gender and sex segregated. So whenever I've done mikveh ritual, I just use an outdoor, naturally gender neutral mikveh space.

Mark Gunnery: Liora, I want to ask you one last thing. So you put Nicki Green's piece, Sabbath Crock, in the same section as Joy Ladin's poetry. Can you talk about how you see them in conversation with each other?

Liora Ostroff: I think that both Joy and Nicki are working at this intersection that Nicki mentioned, the intersection of Jewishness and queerness and transness, and both are also thinking about whether these identities are disparate or how they intersect each other. I think that Joy's poems describe the effects of fearing her self expression, fear of change, fear of cruelty or violence and self-loathing and shame. I read Ready and Changing The Subject as describing relationships with family and of struggling with just being seen, and I think that Nicki also addresses this struggle with visibility. She describes the ongoing process of creating safety for herself, both through her practice, and by being visibly Jewish and trans, so both of them are talking about visibility as well. And I would also add that the strength that both of these artists bring to the subject is another commonality. Joy shows us a lot of pain and struggle, whereas I think that this piece by Nicki is mostly hopeful and futuristic.

Mark Gunnery: Do you have anything to say about that, about your piece in conversation with Joy's poetry?

Nicki Green: I find these parallels to be really interesting to consider. I think that any engagement with transness and Jewishness feels exciting to me. I think that there is very little of it and it actually feels, I would say, not just a trans practice, but actually quite a queer practice of not seeing yourself reflected in the world around you, and so needing to look deeply, creatively at that world to interpret what you're seeing as queer, maybe not inherently queer, but queer in the context. And I think that when there are moments or practices that are visible of other people threading these identities into each other, one is offered the reprieve from needing to dig and really, really search deeply for that point of connection. And so Joy's work does that for me, it feels like this reprieve in this aha moment of understanding how transness and how Jewishness could potentially intercept or how they do intercept for her.

I think that my work is specifically about forward looking, or maybe not entirely forward looking, looking back for short... but also imagining possibilities moving forward. And so I think about the work as almost... I'll say things... a Neo historical object or a historical object for the future, this idea that the work that I'm making, particularly in ceramic, as this permanent material could become an artifact of my life, my experience. And I think, what I mentioned earlier, this idea that, for me, my art practice is often a way of proposing something that doesn't exist. And so I get a lot of questions about... Oh, does the mikveh work? Could you put pickles into that Sabbath Crock? And I think that the answer is always quite possibly, but that's not really the point.

The point is bringing it into the world and proposing this, offering an opportunity for this object to be materialized and to imagine what it might be like to share space or to experience what it feels like to share space with these objects. And then their functionality almost comes second, which is a complicated thing for a practical functional material practice, so much of ceramic work is about the functionality of the forms, and I'm much more interested in the proposal, the wishful thinking of bringing the object into the world and seeing what it feels like to witness it's materializing, and I think that Joy is doing that as well. I understand the language that you've put forth about the anxieties of moving through the world as a trans person, the self-loathing of engaging in a trans experience, and also Laverne Cox talks a lot about, not role model, but possibility model, to see the possibility of a person creatively engaging the intersections of your identity is... makes it feel real and possible to exist in the world. And to not just exist, but to thrive and push forward.

Mark Gunnery: I have one last question for you. So you brought up mushrooms earlier, and fungi, you said in your artist statement that you make a lot of work about the Nazi era metaphor of the poisonous mushroom. What is that concept and how have you used it in your work and what's it been like to work with that thing?

Nicki Green: So the reference point that I'm using is a book from 1938 called The Poisonous Mushroom that was produced in Germany as a children's book that really functioned as, I would say, a field guide of how to recognize Jewish bodies in a Aryan society. And so the entire book are anecdotes about how a Jewish person, and specifically, how a German Jewish person, or how an Ashkenazi body operates in the world and how to identify that Jewishness. And there's a lot of toxicity and that, for obvious reasons. But when I found that book randomly, while I was doing research, I had been thinking about and really wanting to explore queerness, transness and Jewishness as this organic and almost proliferating concept and fungus felt like this exciting way to explore that idea in the book in The Poisonous Mushroom.

The opening narrative is a child foraging for mushrooms with his mother, and he picks a mushroom and says... Can I eat this? And the mother says... No, you can't eat that because it might be poisonous and you might die and you can't just eat any mushroom you find, just like you can't trust every person you meet because they might be Jewish. And I think, for me, what really jumped out to me, is both the metaphor of the Jewish body is a mushroom, but primarily this relationship to visibility and passibility, which is a huge discussion in trans communities, and I would say, a particularly relevant discussion for trans women who are receiving a significant amount of violence out in the world. So there's this really complicated relationship to passing passibility, how to move through the world safely. And this discussion of the poisonous mushroom as this entity that could say "hide in plain sight" or pass as Aryan, but is actually not Aryan, is really engaging in a fluctuating visibility, a relational shifting, understanding of a body in the world and it's legibility and it feels really connected to transness.

So to me, this felt like a link, one might even say this is mycelium right, the underground network of threads that connect the fruiting bodies of the mushrooms to each other. This is a point, where for me, transness and Jewishness intersect each other. And I think as a trans person and as a queer person, so much of my political engagement, political awareness, is intersecting with, or is exploring this idea of anti assimilationist values and politics. And so what does it mean really to take on poisonousness as a empowering way of being in the world.

The activist group, the Lesbian Avengers slogan was, “We recruit”. And this idea that mushroom shoots spores out into the world and create this proliferating, uncontrollable organism that is reproducing constantly and asexually, it feels like this really exciting metaphor for queerness and transness that is from my origin point or from my understanding of this metaphor's origin point inherently connected to Jewishness. And so it allows me to talk about proliferating life and aliveness, both through queerness and through Jewishness without necessarily needing to talk about either one explicitly. I get to also just talk about fungus, which is such a cool thing, such a cool opportunity.

Mark Gunnery: Well, Nicki Green, it's been really nice talking to you. Thanks for joining us.

Nicki Green: Thanks so much for having me. It's been really fun getting to chat with both of you.

Mark Gunnery: That's Nicki Green, a transdisciplinary artist working primarily in clay. Her work Sabbath Crock is featured in the queer life section of A Fence Around The Torah. Again, Nicki, thanks for joining us. I've also been joined by Liora Ostroff. Liora Ostroff is curator-in-residence here at the Jewish Museum of Maryland and was the curator of A Fence Around The Torah. Liora Ostroff, thank you for joining us.

Liora Ostroff: Thank you both.

Mark Gunnery: Thank you so much for listening to Disloyal. We hope you enjoyed the podcast and we'd love to hear your feedback. Our email address is disloyal@jewishmuseummd.org. You can follow us on Twitter at jewishmuseummd or on Instagram at jewishmuseum_md. And if you're in Baltimore, come visit. Go to jewishmuseummd.org for more information and to become a member if you're interested in supporting content like this podcast. Visit afencearoundthetorah.com to check out our latest art exhibit. Disloyal is a production of the Jewish Museum of Maryland and it's produced and hosted by me,  Mark Gunnery, with production assistance from Naomi Weintraub, the Jewish Museum of Maryland's community artist-in-residence. Our executive director is Sol Davis. You can subscribe to Disloyal wherever you listen to podcasts. New episodes each Friday. Until next time, take care.