The art of Lisa Edelstein: 'Messy, imperfect, awkward, beautiful, these people'

My parents are on the move again. After two years at an assisted living facility in Buffalo Grove, it’s down to Addison to a smaller place that better suits their needs. Moving means packing, and once more my wife and I boxed up their possessions, weeding out what can’t make the transition from three rooms to one.

“How about this?” my wife said, holding up a round metal 1950s cookie tin. “Photos.”

“Throw it away,” replied my mother. She never even looked inside.

The past burdens and buoys us, holding us back and driving us forward, like stunned survivors wandering across a minefield. The moment I clapped eyes on Lisa Edelstein’s paintings, my first thought was “Jewish unease.” The awkwardness of one’s own relatives, frozen in the garish 1970s. The lucky few who somehow made it from Lodz to Levittown. They call to us, in their thin, wavering voices, from beyond the grave, or its lip. A hard tin to throw away, and Edelstein has taken her family Kodachromes and transformed them into evocative paintings.

“I love finding the in-between shots, the poorly posed, the awkward, the strange angles, even damaged photos or film stills,” said Edelstein, an actor you might know as Dr. Cuddy in “House.” “Taking these unvalued shots and blowing the images up into carefully rendered paintings, celebrating them that way — there’s so much life and story and discomfort that gets exposed.”

Edelstein’s work has to be viewed through the fog of anti-Semitism, always a haze in society but billowing up even more after six months of the war in Gaza. Not the easiest moment to be Jewish, never mind examine the out-of-placeness of our tribe.

“Yes, this is a wildly fraught time to be Jewish, which is absolutely part of why I am making these paintings,” said Edelstein, whose husband, Robert Russell, is also an artist. “Robert and I have gone to countless art shows over the 14 years we’ve been together, and we’ve seen a lot of identity-based work. All of the various identities were demanding representation within the larger human story. And not just representation — celebration. But not Jews. Where are the Jews?”

Let me answer that one: Jews don’t count. We can’t belong, not even among the marginalized. Not after killing Christ ... whoops, last season’s slur — not while running the banks, media and Hollywood ... no wait, I’ve got it: not after forming a country that exists and defends itself when attacked.

You’ll find Jews aplenty in “Meshugenah” — “a celebration of the Jewish artistic expression” — that includes paintings by Edelstein, her husband and other artists. The show opened Friday at A Very Serious Gallery, 673 N. Milwaukee Ave., and runs until May 2.

I told Edelstein about the round tin of photos.

“It’s funny you should mention where your parents are at, because that was exactly what spurred this on for me: moving my parents to Los Angeles during the lockdown,” she said. “They were downsizing, so I inherited all the family photos by default. Suddenly, I had a thousand more.”

Provided photo

At the risk of suggesting Jews are part of humanity, there is not just a specificity but a universality to Edelstein’s work.

“People recognize their own families in them even if they aren’t Jewish and even though it’s a painting of strangers,” she said. “I love that. After October 7th, there were definitely more yarmulkes in the images I selected. Putting a yarmulke in a painting pushes buttons. I got death threats when I posted one. I want people to think about why that is.”

Edelstein’s paintings are large — why make them so big? A bit pushy, no?

“There is absolutely an element of assertion, and even demand, in choosing to make these images so large,” she replied. “It’s an insistence that these lives also be included in the tapestry of the world. Messy, imperfect, awkward, beautiful, these people, this culture, is a place to come from. ... That’s what I’m looking for when I dig through the piles. That’s what I want to celebrate. ... I’ve discovered so much — in blurry gestures, hidden cigarettes, sideways glances, that it’s brought me closer to my own story.”

Speaking of which. I kept the round tin. It’s sitting on my desk now. At home, I pried open the lid — small, scallop-edged black and white photos, mostly, of my mother as a girl, plus many people I don’t know. And there, buried deep, one color shot, of my brother, myself and my grandmother, in her living room in 1968. Her hand protectively on his shoulder, her head thrown back, gazing directly at the camera. Proud.

Provided photo.