At Drawing Rooms in Jersey City, Material Wonder: Jewish Joy and Mysticism in 2025 presents works that engage with Jewish identity, mysticism, and inherited traditions. Curated by Anne Trauben, the exhibition, on view from February 13 to April 5, 2025, features artists Carol Salmanson, Denise Treizman, Rachel Klinghoffer, Pesya Altman, and Trauben herself. Their works—encompassing drawing, painting, fiber, mixed media, and light-based sculpture—explore memory, ritual, and transformation.
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Visitors enter through a visually connected exhibition in The Alcove Gallery, a narrow corridor densely covered in black-and-white stickers referencing October 7th, 2023, when 261 Israeli hostages were abducted from Israel to the Gaza Strip by terror organizations. As these lines are written, the Bibas family—nine-month-old Kfir, four-year-old Ariel, and their thirty-two-year-old mother, Shiri—are being laid to rest in Israel. This young family’s fate remained unknown until now, with their brutal murders becoming a haunting symbol of this attack. The confined tunnel-like space, filled with repetitive faces, echoes this heavy sense of loss, pressing inward before opening into the main exhibition, which sprawls over three rooms. There, color, material, and light take over. Light is the central unifying thread through Salmanson’s illuminated sculptures, Treizman’s reflective and neon assemblages, Klinghoffer’s layered surfaces, Trauben’s translucent installations, and Altman’s saturated paintings.
Carol Salmanson shapes light itself into form. Her sculptures—made from LEDs, reflective materials, and transparent surfaces—hover between solidity and immateriality. In daylight, they appear as fragile arrangements of shape and structure; in darkness, they become luminous presences, recalling the glow of Byzantine mosaics and the elaborate stained glass of churches and synagogues. Yet, alongside these allusions to the sacred, Salmanson’s patterned shapes and vivid colors explode with pop-psychedelic energy. The devotional and the decorative co-exist—colliding, merging, and resisting any fixed hierarchy.
Unlike other works in the exhibition, where light interacts with surfaces externally, in Salmanson’s pieces, it is embedded, contained, and radiates outward as the very substance of the work. Her sculptures shift with the surrounding environment, evoking both playfulness and mysticism.
Salmanson luminous energy finds a counterpoint in Denise Treizman’s assemblages, where reflection, saturation, and material accumulation generate a different kind of radiance. Treizman builds her sculptures from found objects, textiles, and neon-colored materials, integrating weaving, layering, and embedded lighting elements. Raised in a Chilean-Israeli Jewish household, she connects her practice to matrilineal craft traditions, working with bright tape, sequins, spray paint, and discarded consumer goods. Her work plays with transformation—overlooked materials are transformed into dynamic new entities through unexpected relationships.
In Treizman’s work, light is active rather than contained: surfaces shimmer, catch, and reflect; neon colors vibrate; metallics flash. Her sculptures scatter light as color across surfaces, as another potent tool in her materials arsenal. For instance, Sweet sixteen, won’t you come back? features a linear rainbow light that protrudes from the mid-top, curves downward to the bottom right, and disappears in the back, where it manifests as a glowing yellow light emanating from below. Here, light conjures both childhood and its loss. This idea of revelation—of light emerging from the material itself—carries into Rachel Klinghoffer’s paintings, where luminosity does not sit on the surface but forces its way from beneath.
Klinghoffer’s mixed media paintings are built from layers of acrylic paint and embedded materials, creating surfaces that reveal and conceal. Light presses through these layers, breaking out from beneath, suggesting memory surfacing through time. Deep blues and purples reference sacred spaces, while golems, hamsas, and the Hebrew letter “Shin” structure her compositions. The letter Shin—central to the Shema prayer and the first letter in the word “shalom,” peace— functions as both an invocation of protection and an emblem of survival. Like Treizman, Klinghoffer works with accumulation—objects, textures, and memories embedded into the work—but rather than dispersing energy outward, she allows light to emerge from within as if excavated from beneath layers of history and mystical realms of being.
The tension between concealment and revelation also plays a role in Anne Trauben’s mixed-media works, where light shifts through transparency and reflection. Trauben works with fabric remnants, embroidery hoops, beads, and Mylar, repurposing materials into wall installations incorporating hamsas, amulets, and craft techniques. Translucency plays a crucial role—Mylar, foil, and glass beads catch and disperse light, changing as the viewer moves. In contrast to Klinghoffer, who builds layers that must be broken through, Trauben’s materials allow light to pass freely, shifting and flickering. Her use of textiles and found materials connects to personal and inherited histories.
Just as Trauben’s use of textiles is both biographical and rooted in cultural memory, Pesya Altman’s landscapes reflect her migration experience, mapping a personal and symbolic terrain. In her Stranger in Paradise series, recurring symbols—mushrooms, palm trees, mapping markers—form a dreamlike geography. Here, the vivid color becomes light, energizing the surface and heightening the painting’s otherworldly atmosphere
Since its opening in 2012, Drawing Rooms has presented four identity-focused exhibitions, reinforcing its commitment to amplifying underrepresented voices. In Material Wonder, curator Anne Trauben interprets Jewish cultural inheritance through art as a process of transformation—reshaping tradition and history into new forms and creating space for joy, mysticism, and reinvention.
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Material Wonder: Jewish Joy and Mysticism in 2025 at the DRAWING ROOMS
Topps Building, 926 Newark Ave #T101, Jersey City, NJ 07306
On view through April 5, 2025, features artists Carol Salmanson, Denise Treizman, Rachel Klinghoffer, Pesya Altman, and Anne Trauben