A Cooper Union art student’s paintings recall her Israeli family’s roots in a community shattered on Oct. 7 By Julia Gergely March 11, 2024
"...“In the art world, in recent years, there’s been a lot of focus on figurative art... This is probably the most popular form of art on the market right now — art about gender or race or ethnicity or sexuality,” Arad said. “So it’s very interesting to me that in this environment, there’s suddenly now a push towards discrediting and diminishing [Israeli and Jewish] identity.”
“The reason I’m doing this is to create work in this format that’s accepted — making work about one’s identity, but about an identity that is hated, and sometimes not even hated — sometimes just people refuse to acknowledge it exists,” she added. “In a way, every painting is just proof — you can’t say [Israeli identity] does not exist, because every painting says ‘here I am.’”