Siona Benjamin Making Art ‘Beyond Borders’

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Iconic is the most wrongly used word in our language, but for the work of Siona Benjamin, the word often fits. The best of her paintings conjures up universes of multiplicity where the myths of many nations cohere and inspire. “Beyond Borders: The Art of Siona Benjamin” (at the Jewish Museum Milwaukee through Sept. 25) is unlike anything else in contemporary or historical art for its particular symbiosis. Her sometimes startling but always organic juxtapositions are neither slapdash nor sophomoric (as is much current art) but deeply felt and artfully rendered. Their sensibility grew within the context of Benjamin’s background.

She was born into India’s dwindling Jewish community, a branch of the diaspora that reached the subcontinent 2,000 years ago. Benjamin grew up in Mumbai at a time when India acknowledged itself as a multicultural nation; she was educated in Roman Catholic and Zoroastrian schools and had Muslim and Hindu friends without losing sight of her heritage. Since arriving in the U.S. in 1986, she became ever more acutely aware of standing at a busy intersection of cultural descriptors and the necessity of making something meaningful from being hyper-hyphenated as a Jewish-Indian-Asian-American woman.

“She is a unique artist in so many ways and over the past 20 years she has become internationally renowned with commissions from all over. Her philosophy dovetails with what we aim to do here,” says Molly Dubin, curator at the Jewish Museum Milwaukee. Dubin refers to Tikkun, the Jewish concept of human responsibility for repairing the broken world through working for social justice.

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One of the dominant recurring images in Benjamin’s oeuvre is a woman in blue, representing both the artist and Lilith, the first woman and Adam’s first wife according to the Babylonian Talmud. “She identifies as blue, as a Jewish woman of color,” Dubin says. “Blue symbolizes the Other without the tropes or stereotypes people project onto other colors.” Blue is also universal, the color of sea and sky, the blue of our world. Not incidentally, blue is also the color associated with many deities in Hindu iconography.

The willful Lilith has been a controversial, even despised figure in the Jewish tradition. Benjamin’s appropriation of her is in keeping with her desire to flip Judaism’s patriarchy on its head—or at least on its side, making room for equal respect for Sara, Rebecca, Esther and other biblical matriarchs.

Several works in “Beyond Borders” demand special mention. In her seven-paneled Exodus: I See Myself in You (2016), the images in gouache, acrylic and gold leaf on wood suggest an altar piece for a faith with many profound roots. In colors of deep blue and bright copper, fire red and lush green, Benjamin depicts a wandering man shouldering a ram, a mother sheltering her child in the belly of a whale, the cry of a solitary woman in anguish and the intervention of angelic and demonic beings. The swirling background patterns suggest that existence is forever in flux, and the Exodus of the title invokes the archetypal immigrant experience of an entire nation in search of a promised land. The blue woman of her paintings is often concerned with finding home or remaking it in her own image.

The central image of the mixed media installation Lilith in the New World (2008) pays homage to the boldly appropriated cartooning of Roy Lichtenstein. It’s pop art gone Bollywood, complete with an explosive BLAM and an enigmatic thought bubble rising from Lilith: “You Must Save Us From Their Wrath.” Lilith’s copper-braceleted hands are drawn together in prayer, her long head scarf trails into a prayer shawl, her mini-skirt is woven from Indian fabric with Edenic images of romping rams and lions. Some of Benjamin’s statements are provocative. In a work for gouache and gold leaf on paper, Finding Home #68 (Fereshteh) (2004), the blue woman is both a Palestinian refugee and a Holocaust prisoner, wearing a hijab and striped camp garb, speaking to the universality of oppression and survival.

“Beyond Borders” contains a multitude of sources, including angels from Persian miniatures, the flames and arrows of Christian martyrdom, Hindu mandalas and many-armed goddesses that turn into menorahs, the amulets common to the Islamic and Jewish Near East and a mix of alphabets (Hebrew names in Hindi, Urdu words in Hebrew) as well as ‘70s Indian comic books and illuminated medieval manuscripts. The exhibit is about finding commonalities between religions and cultures, a visual diary about how traditions can meet and merge within one woman without losing their identity. With its many layers of meaning, “Beyond Borders” is an exhibit worth seeing more than once.