by Audrey Sage

“I created “Writing Home: Conversations with our Ancestors” as an interactive performance at the Eldridge Street Project on the Lower East Side in New York City. It explored the connection between place, language and memory as it relates to the American immigrant experience. I set up a portable office within the 1887 synagogue and invited visitors to dictate letters to their ancestors. Then I typed the responses, gave the original to the participants and displayed a carbon copy. 

A companion piece, “Chain Letter,” consisted of an intricate sculptural paper chain that served as a screen through which the magnificent sanctuary could be seen. The chain was made from pages of a Yiddish dictionary and a Chinese-language volume listing books permitted for publication by Communist censors. “Chain Letter” referenced some of the reasons that people left their birthplaces for America. By incorporating both Yiddish and Chinese texts, the work also alluded to the evolution of the neighborhood in which it was installed.” Sheryl Oring 5/18

Oring is continuing to perform “Writing Home” at venues such as the International Center in New York City. And together with Jamie Munkatchy of the Booklyn Artists Alliance, Oring has created a limited edition artist book based on this project.

https://www.sheryloring.org/writing-home

This work of art, created by Sheryl Oring in 2006, is a 7.25 x 5.5″ three-panel portfolio. It closes with leather ties and is bound in beige linen bookcloth by Jamie Munkatchy. Each book features an original Polaroid photograph of the Eldridge Street Synagogue or the surrounding neighborhood on the cover. Contents include a hand-typed introduction; 43 letters dictated during performances at the Eldridge Street Project in 2005; and, a flag-bound book featuring eleven Polaroid photos of Eldridge Street Synagogue and the surrounding neighborhood. Inside pockets are made out of pages from a Yiddish dictionary and a Chinese-language volume listing books permitted for publication by Communist censors, alluding to the mixed nature of this Lower East Side-Chinatown neighborhood. The volume is housed in a custom built clamshell box with matching linen bookcloth.

“Sheryl Oring examines critical social issues through projects that incorporate old and new media to tell stories, examine public opinion and foster open exchange. Using tools typically employed by journalists (the camera, the typewriter, the pen, the interview and the archive) she builds on experience in her former profession to create installations, performances, prints, artist books, sculptures, and internet-based works that address themes of democracy, citizenship, free expression, first amendment rights, story-telling and activism through art.

Oring is a Creative Capital Fellow and has received grants from Franklin Furnace, New York Foundation for the Arts, the Puffin Foundation, and the North Carolina Council for the Arts. She has shown her work at the U.S. Pavilion of the Venice Architecture Biennale; Bryant Park in Manhattan; the Brooklyn Public Library; the Free Library of Philadelphia, the National Liberty Museum in Philadelphia; the Jewish Museum Berlin; and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. She has also presented work at Art in Odd Places in New York; the Art Prospect festival in St. Petersburg, Russia; Encuentro in Sao Paolo, Brazil; and the International Symposium on Electronic Art in Dubai.

She has completed public art commissions at the San Diego International Airport and at the Tampa International Airport. Collecting institutions include the Library of Congress; Museum of Modern Art; Tate Britain; Bibliothèque nationale de Luxembourg; University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; La Jolla Athenaeum; Yale University; University of California, Irvine; and many other university libraries across the United States.

Alongside her art practice, Oring is an academic leader. She currently serves as Professor and Chair of the Department of Applied Design at Appalachian State University in Boone, NC. Prior to joining App State, she worked as Professor and Dean of the School of Art at University of the Arts in Philadelphia; Professor and Chair of the James Pearson Duffy Department of Art, Art History, and Design at Wayne State University in Detroit; and as Assistant and Associate Professor in the School of Art at University of North Carolina at Greensboro.” -sheryloring.org/about