Artist Lisa Edelstein’s family fled the violence and discrimination of Europe and found success in the new world. Her new exhibit “Dance Me to the End of the World” at the Charlie James Gallery in Los Angeles features paintings deeply rooted in the Jewish diasporic experience of growing up within a multigenerational family with lush surroundings – designed interiors, new cars, dance lessons – signaling a flourishing made possible by this new start in America, while also firmly rejecting the deprivations of wartime Europe that hover in the recent past. This immigrant success story suffuses the paintings, from the proud stance of the couple in Day Trip to the beach vacation in Cruising. The exhibition runs through February 15 at the Charlie James Gallery in Los Angeles. The title of the exhibition references the Leonard Cohen classic whose instrumentation evokes traditional Jewish klezmer music. The song shares a cultural pride and dark sweet sadness with Edelstein’s paintings. The exhibition runs through February 15 at the Charlie James Gallery in Los Angeles. Find out more here.

Dance Me to the End of the World

Dance Me to the End of the World is a show of paintings about a culture in diaspora. Using images pulled from the massive pile of old family photos I’ve collected, I paint the narratives, the relationships, the secrets and the ephemera of the world I grew up in. 

I was inspired by the Dutch masters, who made beautiful paintings of the mundane and thereby kept a way of life forever preserved. So, what I look for in an image is just that, beyond the narrative, beyond the nostalgia, does it normalize the lives of the Jewish diaspora, does it make us part of the larger story. There is an urgency in keeping us real, relevant and remembered, especially now, when Jews have once again found themselves in a terribly mutating spotlight.

It’s been a tough year for Jews, and this show, painted after the horrors of October 7th, is decidedly more Jewish in response. It’s difficult to find a way towards a real conversation with anyone who didn’t check in on October 8th, 9th, 10th, 11th or, you know, never. And many people aren’t hearing each other post Oct. 7. So, in lieu of conversation, my reaction has been to paint more men in yarmulkes, more candles, more challahs, more all of it because all of these things have suddenly become radical expressions.

When I first started painting during the Covid lockdown, when all I had as a resource was that pile of family photos, I decided to make a coloring book about my family.  The coloring book idea quickly morphed into larger and more complex drawings and finally paintings. My first show was really about the complexities of family, my second being about suburban refuge. But this show is really, straightforwardly Jew-centric. There are so many artworks out there that are grounded in identity, and this one is decidedly mine.

Lisa Edelstein is an artist, actress, writer and filmmaker. She studied drama and experimental theater at NYU, then wrote, composed and performed her musical “Positive Me” at La Mama Theater in NYC. It was an AIDS awareness musical responding to the crisis of that time. She spent the next 30 years playing a wide variety of culturally ground-breaking roles, including, among others, the first ever lesbian make-out scene on network TV (Rhonda Roth, “Relativity,”) a well-educated, pot-smoking sex worker (Laurie on “West Wing,”) Cuddy on the world-wide hit Fox medical drama “House,” Abby and her struggling menopausal glamour on “Girlfriends’ Guide to Divorce,” Phoebe, Alan Arkin’s drug addict daughter on “The Kominsky Method,” and Golda, the Holocaust survivor who unknowingly adopts a stolen indigenous child in Freemantle’s “Little Bird.”

Lisa Edelstein’s watercolors are marked by an informal and intimate quality. She turns back the clock to an earlier era, not time frozen, rather a conjuring of the familiar past. Edelstein’s selection process is dramaturgical. She prioritizes scenes, stories, and narrative to drive her compositions. In painting them, Edelstein has given these images an enormous amount of concentrated attention when contrasted with the original photographers, who casually pointed a camera in the direction of some action and snapped away. Her painterly mist points toward the complexities of memory to the expanse beyond. She started painting in 2021. This is her third solo exhibition, her first with Charlie James Gallery. Edelstein lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.

*Photos of the paintings by Yubo Dong