Finding Home: The Midrashic Art of Siona Benjamin

Siona Benjamin's identity as a minority "other" originates with her Jewish upbringing in Bombay, India, with its Hindu and Muslim majorities, and her attendance at Catholic and Zoroastrian schools. Undergraduate art school in Bombay and then immigration to and graduate school in the American Midwest were followed by teaching stints in Connecticut and New Jersey. With her move to a suburb of New York City, which, she says, reminds her of the cosmopolitan Bombay of her childhood, she feels that she has found home. Like her meandering background, the works she is creating in this finally realized home, including the six on display in this virtual "gallery," are inevitably tricky to categorize.

Benjamin's paintings combine the sensibility of Indic (Hindu) figurative miniatures, the colors, geometric, vegetal and floral patterns typical of Muslim art, and some characteristics of Persian art, which combines all of these elements. All of them are informed, however, by biblical subject matter, reflections on gender, and an interest in midrashic process—digging beneath the surface of a text. The imagery in these paintings connects to Indian mythology, Bollywood posters and Roy Lichtenstein-inspired comics.¹ Yet with the general title "Finding Home," and with some of the works secondarily entitled Fereshteh—an Urdu term meaning "angels"—it is apparent that the artist is inviting us to accompany her on her search not only for home, but for all that shapes both physical and spiritual identity.

Let us begin with Benjamin's depiction of Miriam, the sister of Moses, leader of joyful dances and finder of water in the wilderness (Figure 1). Miriam, by whose merit, according to a well known midrash, God granted a well to accompany the Israelites through the desert (see, e.g., Number rabbah 1:2). Miriam, was virtually passed over in the narrative of the Passover seder until the advent of "Miriam's Cup,"² a contemporary feminist ritual. Benjamin

Figure 1.

Siona Benjamin, Finding Home #73 (Fereshteh): Miriam (2006). Gouache and gold leaf on wood panel, 10 × 7. Courtesy of Cheryl Pelavin Fine Art, New York: www.cherylpelavin.com, and the artist.

Figure 2.

Siona Benjamin, Finding Home #72 (Fereshteh): Miriam (2006). Gouache and gold leaf on wood panel, 18 × 15.3. Courtesy of Cheryl Pelavin Fine Art, New York: www.cherylpelavin.com, and the artist.

Figure 3.

Siona Benjamin, Finding Home #89 (Fereshteh): Vashti (2006). Gouache and gold leaf on wood panel, 7 × 10. Courtesy of Cheryl Pelavin Fine Art, New York: www.cherylpelavin.com, and the artist.

Figure 4.

Siona Benjamin, Finding Home #93 (Fereshteh): Mahalat (2006). Gouache, gold leaf and digital image on paper, 22 × 22. Courtesy of Cheryl Pelavin Fine Art, New York: www.cherylpelavin.com, and the artist.

Figure 5.

Siona Benjamin, Finding Home #84 (Fereshteh): Abraham (2006). Gouache and gold leaf on paper, 8 × 6. Courtesy of Cheryl Pelavin Fine Art, New York: www.cherylpelavin.com, and the artist.

Figure 6.

Siona Benjamin, Finding Home #71 (Fereshteh): Adah (2006). Gouache and gold leaf on paper, 17 × 13. Courtesy of Cheryl Pelavin Fine Art, New York: www.cherylpelavin.com, and the artist.

depicts her with blue skin, like Krishna in Indian miniatures,³ and wearing a sari. She reclines in a goblet, connected intravenously to both water and blood as life sources, and surrounded by faces. One wonders: Are these the faces of the people of Israel, present and future? Closer inspection suggests the faces of destroyers—the Egyptians—swallowed by the sea, turned gray and rising as a distant, threatening mushroom cloud. The goblet is set in a shadowed field (five-fold like the number of books in the Torah) and surrounded and framed by floral and vegetal imagery: the imagery of fertility and life.

In another piece, also called Miriam, the sister of Moses dances at the center of a...