The girls and women in Hannah Lupton Reinhard’s paintings are hard to pin down. In bucolic and pastoral scenes, their flowing dresses and bare feet might place them at a summer music festival, though their headscarves recall the babushkas of Eastern European shtetls. Some subconsciously wear their breasts while holding items of Jewish ritual such as candles and wine vessels in hands adorned with long false fingernails. The artist renders bodily forms with a sculptural solidity reminiscent of the Old Masters of the Renaissance, painstakingly formed with thin layers of luminous oil paint. She updates this foundation with a hyper-saturated color palette reminiscent of Lisa Frank’s neon palette, and showy groupings of rhinestones (a nod to her grandmother, a Swarovski jeweler who would sell his hand-beaded creations at Saks Fifth Avenue). With these overlapping contradictions, Lupton Reinhard presents a vision of Jewish femininity that is both progressive and rooted in tradition, an unabashed blend of the sacred and the profane.
Lupton Reinhard grew up in a conservative Jewish family (“conservative” refers to a religious movement, not a political philosophy) in Orange County, the daughter of two college professors. She was religiously observant, kept kosher, with separate dishes for meat and dairy (as she always does) and attended a Jewish school. “I grew up thinking that everyone else in the world was Jewish,” she said. Hyperallergic on a Zoom call from an artist residency in New York. “I was living in a bubble.
Her bubble burst when she transferred to Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) and struggled to fit into a Jewish community. “Obviously there were Jews at RISD but I couldn’t find them… That’s where I felt really lost.”
She decided to create this community herself and began hosting inclusive Shabbat dinners at her home on Friday nights, comprised of Jews and non-Jews. “Some of them had never met a Jew before me,” she said of her guests, but before long “everyone knew the blessings for candles, wine, bread.”
Lupton Reinhard describes late evenings of youthful exuberance, as opposed to solemn expressions of piety. “They have become sort of iconic Shabbat parties. I adapted religion to my life, not my life to religion.
The title of his recent exhibition at Fredericks & Freiser in New York, Shekinah, Shiksas and other pretty Jewish girls captures this inclusive spirit, “Shekinah” being the Hebrew word for an abode where God resides, and “Shiksa” being the Yiddish word for a non-Jewish woman, taking on a playful rather than derogatory tone here.
Around the same time, she began making her first Jewish-themed paintings, such as a Passover scene with caricatured depictions of her parents and siblings that bore the influence of Nicole Eisenman. A disappointing review followed where her classmates fell silent, presumably afraid to offend with their comments. “Nobody wanted to say anything about it. There was a lot of fear,” she recalls. She then turned to making humorous paintings criticizing Jewish culture with archival footage taken from the Internet, avoiding the intimacy of his first efforts.
When the COVID-19 pandemic began, Reinhard returned to Orange County and was forced to re-evaluate her practice. Isolated in her family home, she began to make small, intimate portraits of her family and friends, bathed in Californian light. “I felt like I didn’t have to prove anything to anyone anymore.”
These paintings collapse time, merging the contemporary and the biblical, placing specific people in ancient narratives. “They are definitely portraits, but I see them as putting on a costume, embodying a character, playing a role,” she said of her subjects. “You always get there with your story and your experiences, but you play a character.”
Old Testament stories feature in most of the paintings in his Fredericks & Freiser exhibition and his first solo exhibition Beshert: indebted at Rusha & Co. in Los Angeles last year, but are often hidden or subtly inferred, as with two paintings of Lot’s daughters from the biblical story. Monumental female figures take up most of each canvas, threatening to shatter their frames if they rise from their crouched positions. One holds a cheap plastic lighter she has just used to light a candle, while the other holds a jug from which a trickle of red wine is flowing, her tap placed suggestively at level of the crotch. Their eyes each meet the gaze of the viewer with defiance. In the background, we see the burning cities of Sodom & Gomorrah that they have just fled.
According to the biblical story, Lot’s daughters, believing they are the only people left on earth, get their father drunk and sleep with him to save mankind. Lupton Reinhard’s version omits the patriarch, shifting the focus to the young female protagonists. “I was so scared of this story growing, I wanted to recontextualize it,” she said. “I imagined it as the first Shabbat, [a chance to] rebuilding the world… I also like the idea that because their hometown burned down, they thought the world was over. That’s what it’s like to be a teenager. Everything is so dramatic. There’s something special about that kind of intensity and that kind of isolation from the rest of the world.
“Wrapping You Around Me” (2023) depicts a girl wrapping a bright orange ribbon around her arm as dazzled bees buzz around her head. Jewish viewers might recognize the ribbon as a stand-in for tefillin, small boxes containing a scroll with verses from the Torah that observant Jews fasten to their arms and head with leather straps during morning prayers. In Orthodox communities, only men are allowed to wear tefillin, giving Lupton Reinhard’s image a subversive edge.
Outdated assumptions about what makes a “good Jew” are at the heart of what Lupton Reinhard’s paintings challenge, setting new models for a contemporary feminist tradition. During a recent studio visit, a collector asked the artist why she, as a Jew, would be covered in tattoos, to which the artist replied, “Because I present myself in a certain way. , there’s all these judgments and ways people expect you to behave.” and smell and dress. These are things that paintings definitely struggle with because that’s what I deal with on a daily basis.
