Tobi Kahn is a painter and sculptor whose work has been shown in over 40 solo exhibitions and over 60 museum and group shows since he was selected as one of nine artists to be included in the 1985 Guggenheim Museum exhibition, New Horizons in American Art. He has more than 25 years of teaching experience in painting, sculpture, photography and art history, and is the founder of the visual arts program at Manhattan Hebrew High School. Tobi currently teaches painting at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, and is Co-founder of AVODA Arts.

The following excerpt accompanied the exhibition Tobi Kahn: Sacred Space for the 21st Century and was published in the book with the same title, edited by Ena Giurescu Heller, published by MOBIA and D Giles Limited London, 2009. It is reprinted with permission.

To create art is natural, an act in the image of the Creator, whose materials are light and darkness, generative and reflecting luminosities, and their attendant color and shadow. Art begins in the capacity to see, a mode of knowing the world and its Maker that is indispensable to the religious and cultural expression of a people.

The sacred spaces and their constituent works in this exhibition have been made for celebration and remembrance in loving community, for the marking of boundaries between holy and daily time, for the beginning of life and its end. They embody a passion for seeing. The Torah, from which our expanding tradition of text and interpretation descends, is replete with the word re-eh, with the glory of sight as a unique medium for exalting the Creator. Extended passages are devoted to the visual elements of the portable Sanctuary in the desert – to crimson, silver and gold, and the Jewish color tekhelet, to bells and pomegranates. The lush portrayal of the Tabernacle’s exquisite detail, in a text that privileges brevity, teaches us how inextricable beauty is from holiness.

The centrality of beauty to holiness is not only authentic but essential to Jewish tradition. All those whose civilization bears a relationship to the Hebrew Bible share this bequest, but the making of art offers the provenance and vocabulary to exemplify it.

In the Jewish way, the divine presence is abstract, incorporeal, without beginning or end. How, then, can God be made manifest in the material world? The infinite and mortal can meet in spaces designated as liminal, dwelling places that invite our spirit, made in the Image, to encounter the ineffable God in both splendor and intimacy. The media for the engagement between transcendence and immanence are the same as those with which the world itself was created: Light, horizon, breath, pattern, the holiness of distinctions.

For me, the life of the spirit is integrally bound to the beauty of the world. Rather than being forbidden, beauty in praise of the Creator is given an honored place. The name of the Tabernacle’s chief artist, Betzalel, means “in the shadow of God,” for his work is understood to be divinely inspired.

Judaism is not an exclusively textual tradition, nor is the making of art prohibited because of the Second Commandment’s injunction against the worship of graven images. The commandments by which Jews express their awe and love of God are performed; their fulfillment is often tactile. When the soul of the Sabbath departs, we breathe in the fragrance of cinnamon, of cloves. On the festival of Succot, we shake the frond of a palm tree and scent our uttered blessing with the unique perfume of the etrog, citron. Intrinsic to every commandment is the prospect of hiddur mitzvah, of amplifying the commandment’s sacredness with beauty.

*

By the time I was six, I knew I would be an artist. Born into a Jewish life saturated with both richness and tragedy, I could not in those early years distinguish between my vision and my Judaism. For hours, I stood at the window of my room in Washington Heights, riveted by the passing world. At my grandfather’s side in the Breuer Synagogue, I was transfixed by the living green of Shavuot leaves and the pattern cast by their shadow, mesmerized by the transformation of the room into a pure white space for Yom Kippur. I thought all Jews lived in the same visual enchantment.

My parents and grandparents, refugees from Germany, honored my making art. They took my sister and me to museums, concerts, and walks in all seasons in Fort Tryon Park. My sister was named for our murdered aunt and I for our uncle, a medical student and artist who, in 1933, was one of the first three Jews killed by the Nazis. The knowledge that European Jewry was annihilated continues to shape my being.

As an artist I am obsessed by memory and its imperatives. The tribute that the dead ask of us is not only to mourn their irreplaceable existence, but to live with joy and fruitfulness. I am always aware of time’s passing, of the possibility of loss, an abrupt reversal of safety. In the face of the world’s instability, I want to reveal not the evident reality but its essence, the inherent vitality that is possible.

Holiness in use: The life of a community within the sacred space of a synagogue encompasses ardor and despair, turbulence and tranquility, sorrow and elation. When a community gathers, its members celebrate and grieve, rejoice in the birth of a child, a new presence, and lament the death of a beloved, newly absent.

Abstraction in imagery and form summons that most Jewish mode: interpretation. The paintings created for this sacred space are an invitation – to discover the grandeur of the world we were given, to contemplate the beginning, its first shapes and forms, to taste a return to the paradise of creation in a world that only our deeds can redeem. These works suggest the continual flowering of life, radiance and darkening, elemental particles of being, earthbound and celestial vantage points.

In living relationship to a Creator, awe and intimacy are in nourishing exchange. Throughout our lives, the microscopic corresponds to the cosmic. We praise and protect the natural world while acting to repair the brokenness – in ourselves and in the global community.

These paintings and ceremonial objects are not static; they are in communion with those who sit in their midst, awakening new and renewed ways of seeing, deepening ways of doing, and revealing beauty in light dazzling and evanescent. In this sacred space, we are porous to each other and to God.

The work created for the memorial chapel recognizes the severance from humankind of those in grief, even as they most require the solace of community. It reflects our longing, faced with the irrevocability of death, to resume our place in an infinite, benign universe composed only of the most enduring elements—the vast sky, the healing bestowed by light, the gold desert in which we were forged as a chosen community. The painting, wall sculpture, and memorial light are designed to offer this stark consolation: Anguish can be contained in a larger, embracing world.

In the beginning, chaos became luminous, newborn. The chairs for the naming of a daughter are new ritual architecture; Jewish life does not yet have a communal, time-hallowed tradition for the covenantal naming of a daughter. These four chairs – on which mothers, grandmothers, and other wise women who transmit the power of the tradition are seated before the welcoming community – invoke the vision of Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel, and Leah, ancestral women seers, granted the discernment to choose which of their children would be blessed as leaders. Art confers on newest life the hallmark characteristics of the biblical mothers: the laughter, strength, tenderness, and fertility we seek to bequeath to our daughters.

Jews are commanded in the Torah to count the forty-nine days of the omer between the second day of Passover, commemorating the exodus from subjugation, to the first day of Shavuot, when the Torah was given and the Jewish people formally constituted. I was born in the middle of the omer, the seven-week period between the season of our liberation and the festival that celebrates the giving and receiving of the Torah at Sinai. Traditionally, Jews count each of the forty-nine days by reciting a brakhah, blessing, and then naming the day’s number and its place within the week. In Jewish mysticism, each day and week are linked to a unique attribute of the Creator.

The counting of the omer represents to me the relationship between a person and his or her community. Each day is distinct, but the sequence of days and weeks is set in a larger framework. Beginning with one, we become an ordered multitude – accruing the dimensions of peoplehood in our journey from slavery to redemption.

For decades, I thought about how to embody this paradox in a work of art. The omer counter that resulted consists of forty-nine sculpted forms in a grid; each one can be set in its place in only a single way. By a daily act, the viewer becomes a participant in the changing work, a celebration of measured time. One by one, the gold-lined spaces of our inner lives are inhabited, each miniature structure refracting the other’s light until the work is complete—and we have counted our way once more to revelation.

*

These works of sacred space and ceremony are not a rupture from the past; they express the past’s living possibilities in the idiom of abstraction. They make visible a preoccupation with art and holiness, a quest to distill what we remember into essential images, archetypes that allow the past to be transformed by imagination into a capacious future, a resonant sanctuary in a still struggling world.