As We Are (2020) Co-curator
Featuring: Laura Jacobs, Sarah Lightman, Davida Pines and Emily Steinberg
As We Are represents the work that emerged from warm, free-flowing, and deeply generous conversations held on alternate Sundays over Zoom during the lockdown.
We, four Jewish women from the UK and the US, came together to consider what it means to study the self during a time of unusual and uncanny quiet; to claim the space necessary to draw self-portraits while home-schooling a very young child or caring for ageing and fragile parents; to observe, with curiosity and suspended judgement, our own increasingly un-coiffed and un-curated external selves; to consider the face coverings that we were learning to tie on and the masks that we were working to take off.
The work of this group has been to notice what happens when we stop trying to arrange ourselves in a particular way; stop striving to say or do the right or expected thing; stop trying to stay within the lines. Our goal is now to see ourselves fully, deeply, carefully, specifically. As we are.
Urban Reckoning (2020) Co-curator with Joonhong Min and Martha Moskowitz
Koppel Project Hive, London
Featuring: Christopher Farrell, David Blackmore, Helena Ben-Zenou, Sam van Strien, Sarah Lightman, Sunyoung Hwang, Joonhong Min and Ziad Naggy.
The Koppel Project is pleased to present Urban Reckoning: a show about urban living as a driving force in art. This group exhibition gathers together eight international artists working in response to the cities they inhabit. Through deeply personal and profoundly objective observation, the artworks in this show discuss the impact of artists' surroundings on their creative expression, through manipulating mediums as diverse as virtual reality, sculpture, painting, drawing, and video art.
Graphic Details: Confessional Comics by Jewish Women (2010-2016) Co-curator
The Cartoon Art Museum, San Francisco, The Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum, Ohio State University, Space Station Sixty Five, London, Jewish Museum Florida, Miami, Oregon Jewish Museum, Portland, The Washington DC JCC, Washington, Yeshiva University Museum, New York, The Gladstone Hotel, Koffler Centre for The Arts, Toronto, Negev Museum of Art, Israel.
Vanessa Davis, Bernice Eisenstein, Sarah Glidden, Miriam Katin, Aline Kominsky-Crumb, Miss Lasko-Gross, Sarah Lazarovic, Miriam Libicki, Sarah Lightman, Diane Noomin, Corinne Pearlman, Trina Robbins, Racheli Rotner, Sharon Rudahl, Laurie Sandell, Ariel Schrag, Lauren Weinstein, Ilana Zeffren
While the history of women in comics is well-documented, and the Jewish contribution to the art form widely acknowledged, Graphic Details: Confessional Comics by Jewish Women will be the first museum exhibit to showcase the singular voices of female Jewish artists whose revealing diaristic and confessional work has influenced the world of comics over the last four decades.
Some bare their bodies. Some expose their psyches. All are fearless about sex, romance, politics, body functions, experiences, emotions, and desires.
Many of the original artworks on display have never been exhibited in public until this show. Artists run the gamut from pioneering Wimmen's Comix and Twisted Sisters artists of the 1970s and 1980s to superstar younger artists:
Diary Drawing Exhibition (2008) Curator
The Centre for Recent Drawing and The School of the Arts, Northampton University
Featuring: Gabrielle Bell, David Blandy, Oliver East, Alex Fox, Miriam Katin, Sarah Lightman, Lady Lucy, Mio Matsumoto, Rutu Modan, Ariel Schrag, and Rebecca Swindell.
Diary Drawing, brings together disparate types of visual journals and autobiographical graphic novels to examine drawing and diary making as possess' of thinking and acting fundamental to human experience. Diary Drawing explores the application of line as a means of documenting or transcribing intimate and individual histories to a public audience. Including artists who use conventional idioms of comic making alongside more exploratory employment of materials: cigarettes are drawn on as well as sketch books and an online blog. The artworks included show diary drawing as a method of documenting performance, journeys, romantic disappointments, the survival of the Nazi Holocaust and cancer. This exhibition also includes artworks that use diary drawing as a method of pursuing fictitious autobiographies.
Schmatte Couture (2008) Curator
Ben Uri Gallery and Rivington Gallery
Marisol Cavia, Anita Ceballos, Meital Cobo, Sue Cohen, Luke Cooper, Natasha Cowan, Nigel Ellis, Patricio Forrester, Sue Goldschmidt, Stuart Mayes, Jacqueline Nicholls, Anneke Raber, Rachel Rose Reid, Sophie Robertson, Ruth Shreiber, and Roberta Weinstein.
Schmatte Couture critiques clothing through art and critiques art through clothing, byway of fashion, fantasy, design, ritual objects, nightmare, and the unwearable. The exhibition started as an artist group that met at the curator’s flat on a monthly basis between 2007 and 2008 to discuss the show and share ideas. By bringing together artists who have similar thematic concerns, the emphasis of the whole project has been, as well as to produce a show, to introduce like-minded artists to each other and form a community with all the benefits that it entails.
Bomberg’s Relevance (2007) Curator
Ben Uri Gallery
Michael Ajerman, Sarah Lightman, Jane Millican , Gideon Rubin, Adriana Swierszczek and Polly Townsend.
The exhibition, examines the painter's artistic legacy and explore how contemporary artists respond to his practice. Each artist has been invited to create a piece of art in response to one of Bomberg's works from the permanent collection at the Ben Uri Gallery.
Sarah Lightman has chosen to respond to Bomberg's 'At the Window' in which a seated woman is shown staring out of an open window. Sarah, who makes "diary drawings" of her life, was moved by the sense of sadness and longing in Bomberg's painting and felt the female figure corresponded to the autobiographical figure that often appears in her own work. "I feel a kinship to David Bomberg's capacity to observe and describe the struggles of life".
The Fortnight of Solo Shows August (2006) Curator
Ben Uri Gallery
Featuring: Oreet Ashery, Roni Ben-Zvi, Frances Bildner, Sue Cohen, Yael David-Cohen, Blake-Ezra Cole, Anna Finchas, Moshe Galili, Rachel Garfield,Laura Green, Alex Jacobs, Laura Jacobs, Adam Kops, Isa Levy, Sarah Lightman, Miranda Lopatkin, Judith Lyons, Joan Noble, Uriel Orlow, Anneke Rabber, Rosalyn Sober, Lawrie Simonson, Jenny Stolzenberg and Tanya Ury.
24 artists displayed a wide variety of works including paintings, drawings, photography, performance, 3D videos, performances and installations.
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