About Etai.
I am a printmaker, judaica artist, and arts educator living on Piscataway land in Maryland. I spend most of my time at the intersection of two very alive cultures that are sometimes assumed to be “dead” - print and Yiddish. I found my way to printmaking through historical research encounters with print culture. In the process of writing about how the Yiddish press documented and shaped political movements in Eastern Europe between 1900-1939, I was moved by the nexus of relationships between writers, artists, technicians, and a mobilized reading public. Today, my printmaking work explores a set of related themes: 1) What is the unique role and potential of printmaking in political education and organizing? 2) How does the physical space of the printshop lend itself as a collaborative meeting space for writers, artists, and activists? 3) What is the unique visual language of Yiddish? 4) How does the interplay of image and expressive typography in Yiddish print culture bridge the gap between Jewish textual and oral traditions? These questions animate my artistic practice as printmaking allows me to tell and remix familiar and unknown cultural stories, often weaving together archival research, folktales, oral histories, and speculative imagining.
I engage with ritual in my practice as acts of repetition, transmission, and transformation. I understand these qualities to be the connective marrow between storytelling and time-intensive craft traditions like printmaking. Printmaking, like telling a good story, requires you to be attentive and present. When I create work inspired by tekhines (Yiddish women’s prayers) or papercut amulet traditions, I think about the labor of my hands paying respect and connecting me to the lineage of those reference points. Often this work involves the double ritual of honoring that inheritance while also reimagining it to be relevant to and inclusive of the experiences of my queer and trans diasporic Jewish community today. I love to imagine that this gesture is mirrored in the act of printmaking and storytelling, which opens room for generative iteration. While much of much of my work engages Jewish history, my intention in doing so is not to memorialize or romanticize a stable narrative of the past, but to think more intentionally about how we carry this past today and what we choose to transmit to future generations.
Photo by Chynnah McFadden
Grounding.
Tsukunst is a combination of two Yiddish words: tsukunft (future) and kunst (art). This represents the belief that art is a vessel for future-making, in how it can drive us in our present by making different possible futures vivid and palpable. Or as the double meaning of the yiddish phrase “es ken gemolt zayn” tells us: it is paintable / it is possible.
Because art is an act of birthing and calling into the world, it allows us to practice embodying the realities that we want to exist - by creating a vibrant Jewish diaspora through our languages, our rituals, our relationships and our acts of solidarity with our neighbors, we birth new realities (and rebirth old realities) that disrupt zionist + all settler colonial notions of belonging through ownership and dominance. I imagine all of us existing and creating at this time as a wild, luscious tree that is growing root systems so wide and intertwined we can crack through concrete foundations, and branches so stretching and lush we know there is enough rest and sweetness for us all.
Exhibitions + Publications
Veln Di Verter Oykh Nern: The Words Will Also Nourish | Artist Book and Prints by Etai Rogers-Fett, at the Tamar Hendel Gallery, Create Arts Center, 2024
Atlanta Print Biennial [Studio Noize Award], Kai Lin Art Gallery, Atlanta, GA, 2023
Key to Success, PAAC Keyholder Residents Group Exhibition, Yumi Hogan International Art Gallery, BWI Marshall Airport, 2023
Art Speaks Juried Exhibition [Award of Merit], Bay School, 2023
Hope/Less: Yiddish New York Arts Exhibition at the Heller Museum, Hebrew Union College 2023
I’ll Be There: An Exhibition About Love at Anne Marie Sculpture Garden & Arts Center 2022
CrossCurrents: God, The God of Unmet Desire by Zisl. Vol. 72, N.1
Protocols Issue # 7: Six + Genders
Mapping Jewish LA: Recovering Yiddish Culture in Los Angeles
Contact Etai
tsukunst@gmail.com