Alix Kramer
25 years old
Chicago, IL
Masters Student
Eli Kaplan Wildmann
37 years old
Jerusalem, Israel
Designer
Eugene Zeleny
31 years old
Newton, MA
Mechanical Engineer
Hadar Cohen
28 years old
Los Angeles, CA
Artist, Educator
Hillel Smith
36 years old
Washington, DC
Artist
Kayla Ginsburg
28 years old
Chicago, IL
Artist
Mia Schon
33 years old
Tel Aviv, Israel
Artist
Noam Mason
22 years old
Worcester, MA
Textile Artist, Teacher
Rachel Jackson
28 years old
Somerville, MA
Artist
Yehoshua Hooper
37 years old
Denver, CO
Artist, Jewish Educator
Hey, I’m Macrame Meg – your one of a kind Krafty in the kitchen host for Expedition Maker!
I’ll be sharing with you the journey of 10 amazing Chosen Makers as they DIY their way to $5,000. Each week, starting Feb 21st, tune in to watch Jewish artists from around the globe compete in Jewish themed challenges in the practice of their choice. We’ve got glitter, we’ve got paints, we’ve got glue. Get ready for the spin of a lifetime because your favorite art elective from camp is coming home with you!
Age: 25 Location: Chicago, IL 
Instagram.com/irunthisknit
Knitting & Knitwear Design
Alix discovered her passion for knitting at age 7 when her Bubbe taught her how to knit a simple scarf. Her love bloomed from there and she’s come a long way from getting in trouble for knitting during class in 5th grade. In the last two years, she has become a knitwear designer with the goal of creating size-inclusive works of art and filling an important niche in the knitting community by becoming the foremost Jewish pattern designer. She is most proud of her Hanukkah Sweater design which has detachable flames for each night.
Week 1
History Has Its Eyes on You
A political statement piece encouraging Jewish people to use their privilege and whiteness to be allies to the people of color in the US who currently need our alliance and support.
Week 2
Let Boys Cry
A statement on the false idol of masculinity – an encouragement to socialize our children the same regardless of gender and encourage young boys to feel the spectrum of emotion.
Week 3
Goodnight Moon
A lunar nightly ritual object for parent and child.
Week 4
Mother Earth’s Routine
A changing headpiece for each season, with a nod to the four souls of nefesh, ruach, neshamah and chayah.
Age: 37 Location: Jerusalem, Israel unboundjerusalem.com and kaplanwildmann.com
Interactive Paper Objects, Light-based Installations, Urban Art and Interventions
Eli Kaplan Wildmann is a designer for theater, urban installations, and tactile visual books. His “unbound” creations have reached hundreds of thousands of people worldwide, reimagining books as one-on-one theatrical experiences. Everything began with the stage, where Eli spent so much time – as a director, designer, producer and writer. In New York, where he studied, he worked on slick Broadway and TV sets as well as weird s#!+ downtown. He is constantly inspired by the variety and passion that can be found in Jerusalem, his favorite city, where he lives with his daughter and leads egalitarian, queer and artistic communities.
Week 1
The Nahafoch Hu Mask: Turning the Tables
While this mask initially shows a globe with a pandemic, full of hot spots and a medical mask, a quick spin turns it into a disco ball Purim costume. Mirrors help us reflect on what within ourselves was revealed during this period of isolation.
Week 2
The Game Of YOUR Life
To smash the false idol of our predetermined paths in life, this map of mandatory stops – BFA, LAX, PHD, U$D, 401K – becomes shattered when you open the tablet. The reverse side creates a diverse, colorful new personal path for you to play with, complete with game tokens and dice.
Week 3
Steampunk Water Calendar
To experience the moon’s connection to birth, the cycles of life, and the natural world, this ritual involves pouring a drop of water from a different vial each of the 30 days of the month, and on the final day, using dyes to form a temporary artistic creation. A cellphone light will project the colors, filling your ceiling with a swirling, personal meditative moon.
Week 4
The Musical Moments Calendar
Jewish time is marked not by the date, but rather by nature, food, light, and most of all – music! Use the wood blocks here to set an intention for yourself about how you will mark time in the upcoming weeks.
Age: 31 Location: Newton, MA http://wouldworkshop.com/ and https://www.etsy.com/shop/WouldWorkShop
Woodworking, Woodburning, Leatherwork, 3D Printing, Costume/Prop Making, Sewing, Papercraft, Metal/Plastic Machining, Industrial Design Sketching, Casting
Over the past few years, Eugene has been a product designer, mechanical engineering contractor, artist, teacher, woodworker, and Moishe House Resident. Making things is just something he does every day, whether it’s for himself, his community, or clients. Eugene has amassed a wide range of maker skills such as carpentry, machining, casting, 3D printing, sewing, leatherworking, design sketching, and papercraft. From building a Russian Dry Sauna with his former MoHo roommates to 3D printing a pair of running shoes, Eugene always tackles a project head-on and never shies away from a design challenge.
Week 1
Crouching Tiger, Armored-Dillo
This leather and 3D printed wood mask offers layers of adjustable protection while illuminating the wearer. A representation of the new layers of protection we’ve all acquired during COVID, but also a reminder that we are the highlights of our own quarantine. (Also something you would see at Burning Man).
Week 2
I-Dollar-Try
This Mishkan-esque box represents the hyper-idealized capitalist USA political and economical system: looks attractive and functional on the outside, but (obviously) disarray and hot garbage on the inside. The “Billionaire Bills” cycle back and forth but the faces stay the same, the money doesn’t go anywhere else, and you can’t really get a good look at the inner machinations unless you know how to peak behind the curtain.
Week 3
Wax on, Wax Off
This kinetic leather candelabra illustrates the alchemical process of transformation and cyclical flow of time during the holiday of Rosh Chodesh: the old moon spins in a circle of flames, feeding the new moon with its wax and intentions. It is an art piece that can create new art pieces ad infinitum.
Week 4
You Spin Me Right Round, Baby Right Round
A minimal, visual calendar papercraft lantern, this piece hangs from the ceiling on a motorized spinning anchor, and has an internal origami structure that houses monthly LED’s to light as the year progresses. There are also options for the exterior of the lantern: the traditional Hebrew calendar, or one with more personal connotations of favorite foods during birthday and dinner parties with family.
Age: 28 Location: Los Angeles, CA hadarcohen.me and https://www.prostrations.com and https://www.patreon.com/hadarcohen
My artistic mediums include performance, movement, printmaking, writing, weaving, sound and ritual. I love creating film of my performance art and ritual practice.
Hadar is a Mizrahi feminist multi-media artist, healer and educator. She is the founder of Feminism All Night, a project that designs communal immersive learning experiences about feminism and spirituality. Hadar is a Jewish mystic who works to build decolonial frameworks for worshiping God. She teaches Jewish scripture and embodied practices through various platforms, including At The Well. Her artistic mediums include performance, movement, printmaking, writing, weaving, sound and ritual.
Week 1
The Velvet Experience
How can masks reveal and conceal who we are? This piece explores the relationship of the self with the clothes that interact with it.
Week 2
False Idols
How do we worship systems of oppression consciously and unconsciously? What would it take to destroy our forms of practice that exalt exploitation and violence?
Week 3
The Process of the Rose
Just as the moon renews herself, so too we renew ourself. This piece depicts the process of fullness releasing into emptiness using the symbology of the rose and water.
Week 4
A Spiritual Path
This spiritual clock is designed to track your internal transformation process of consciousness. You can follow your own pacing to attain spiritual wisdom and use this physical object to reflect your evolution.
Age: 36 Location: Washington, DC hillelsmith.info and hillelsmith.storenvy.com
Graphic Design, Illustration, Lettering/Typography, Papercraft, Murals, Stenciling and Spray Paint Art
Hillel is an artist and designer from Los Angeles, now based in Washington, DC. He has painted dynamic Jewish murals around the world and is the founder of the Jewish Street Art Festival. He revitalizes ancient rituals with digital projects, including Parsha Posters and the Best Omer Ever: GIF the Omer counter, encouraging creative reconsideration of religious practice. Making fun and engaging content is similarly the crux of his work as a designer for clients including HIAS, PJ Library, and Patton Oswalt. He is fascinated by Hebrew typographic history and teaches about the interaction of technology, identity, and design.
Week 1
Emotion Decoder Breastplate
This version of the Kohen Gadol’s (High Priest’s) breastplate helps look under the masks people put up so you can better understand how they’re feeling and be there for them in tough times. It’s made of cardstock, foam core, chandelier chain, and lens filters that decode colorized photos.
Week 2
Monument to (the people behind) Convenience
We’ve become so dependent on the convenience of food delivery and online shopping. The actual people who make all of this happen – cooks, warehouse workers, and delivery people – are the ones we really should be recognizing.
Week 3
Moon Cycle Perpetual Calendar
This calendar tracks the phases of the moon throughout the entire Jewish year, helps you match the lunar cycle with the secular year with an inset calendar, and has an accompanying travel moon-phase-on-the-go. It also has areas to write in intentions and wishes for the coming month, based on the traditional prayer for the new month.
Week 4
Havdallah in the City
This is a complete Havdallah set in the form of a city building, including water tower (wine cup), street lamp (Havdallah candle), Shavua Tov graffiti (spices–it’s made of allspice, curry, and ras el hanout), and mailbox (tzedakah box), with glow-in-the-dark signage on top reminding you to look up and see the 3 stars, smiling though a sundial so you can tell the solar time. It’s all about making ordinary objects holy, marking time through ritual, and filling our homes with light.
Age: 28 Location: Chicago, IL www.kaylaginsburg.com
Illustration (digital and traditional), Painting (watercolor and gouache), Embroidery, Knitting, Rug Making, Quilting, Fabric Dying and Painting, Book Making, Woodworking (basics)
Kayla Ginsburg is an illustrator and comic artist who likes to make things. In 2016 Ginsburg started The Radical Stitchery, an online shop where everything was handmade, queer-made, and (mostly) functional. Through illustrative embroidery she found her way to drawing and comics. Her first zine, From Starfish To The Solidarity, went on to be part of Avodah’s social justice curriculum Tikkun Olam. Her first comic, Hot Jews, was published by Jewish Currents in 2019. Since then, she can’t stop making comics. For her next adventure, Ginsburg and her wife Kaitlin Webster are starting a business together — Incite Dance Center coming to Skokie Illinois in 2021. She is extremely excited. Ginsburg lives and draws in Chicago with her two cats and too many art supplies.
Week 1
The Just Missed You Mask
A mask that tells a story of all the missed connections, the longing, and the isolation of the pandemic. Pull the curtain and wind the scroll to see a figure reaching down but always just missing a parade of figures.
Week 2
Prime Beef
A claymation that reveals the fall idol of the pandemic – Amazon! A PSA that our reliance on convenience comes at the cost of workers and small businesses.
Week 3
Moon On The Go!
A portable moon for your rituals on the go! This piece can fit in your pocket, fold out into a moon, and — with the help of your phone flashlight — transform your space into a starry night.
Week 4
A Palace In Time
A snow globe inspired by Rabbi Heschel’s description of the Sabbath as “a palace in time.” Every seven years our cells have completely regenerated and we are formed anew. Juxtaposing these two concepts reminds us of the resilience of the Jewish people.
Age: 33 Location: Tel Aviv, Israel www.mosaicwithmia.com
Mosaics, Street Art, Portrait Painting, Collage, Woodworking
Mia Schon is an American-Israeli mosaic muralist. Born and raised in Boston, in 2014, Mia made the decision to visit Tel Aviv for three months. She quickly fell in love with the city for its vibrant art scene, heart, and soul — and made Aliyah in 2015.
With a strong affinity for public art, Mia has made it her mission to spread large colorful mosaics throughout Israel while incorporating social, political and cultural themes into her work.
She recently received a Transformative Public Art grant from the City of Boston to respond to Covid-19 and encourage public connectedness piece by piece.
Week 1
Botanical Boom
Houseplants are trending! This costume and mask highlight the physical and mental benefits of surrounding yourself with plants during the pandemic.
Week 2
Jaffa Oranges
These mosaic-ed Jaffa oranges represent the complexities and many pieces of Israel that I came to understand after making Aliyah. It explores the Israeli and Palestinian narratives surrounding the Jaffa Orange.
Week 3
Tastes of Season
Almost all produce in Israel is locally grown, and thus seasonal. Each month we are graced with delicious new tastes and colors. These collages made entirely of recycled magazines capture the vibrancy of the fruit or vegetable of the month.
Week 4
4th Generation
I am a 4th generation female artist. Art runs in our family. The background of this self portrait is made up of images created by my Great Grandmother, Grandmother, and Aunts. Their creativity, wisdom, experience, and support make me the artist who I am today.
Age: 22 Location: Worcester, MA www.KolAtzmotai.com
Linocut Printmaking [silk and paper], Botanical Dyeing [silk and paper].
Noam Mason [pronouns: they/them] is a genderqueer textile artist and educator. They create taleisim, Jewish prayer shawls, using linocut printmaking and botanical dyes on silk noil. Their work draws from a sense of doykeit, or hereness, reflecting the unique textures and designs of the land each person commissioning a tallis grew up in and holds relationship to. Noam is passionate about finding and creating space for trans and queer Jews to fully embody our tradition. In addition to their tallis work, they are a mikveh guide, massage therapist, singer of nigunim, and dedicated bookworm.
Week 1
Mycelium and Human Interconnectedness
The mushroom is just the tip of the iceberg: supporting this shapely fungus head is a sprawling underground network called mycelium that communicates with, feeds from, and nourishes in return the entire forest around it. My mask is the mushroom, the myth of independence, and beneath is a silk tichel (Jewish headscarf) dyed with chestnut and turmeric and printed with a block print pattern of mycelium, our sprawling networks of support, care, and mutual aid that we all engage in to survive and flourish.
Week 2
An Altar of Despair
Printed with a line evoking cycles and futility from Ecclesiastes, “The sun rises and the sun sets”, this ritual cloth is an altar to our own stubbornness. It plays with the idea of artists block and other experiences of feeling stuck in a cycle, and by burning it down attempts to free us from an over-focus on our perceived shortcomings.
Week 3
Taronah Tallis
Dyed with mulberries and wild grape and printed with words from proverbs: “Wisdom cries out in the street”, the Taronah tallis is a prayer shawl for Rosh Khoydesh, a holiday in which many women and genderqueer Jews gather for study, that brings to mind lines of matrilineal wisdom (it was sewn on my great grandmother’s sewing machine!). I carved and printed alternating stripes of shooting stars, ferns, and rosemary in shades of periwinkle, lilac, and sage to wrap myself in the starlit beauty of the new moon.
Week 4
Botanical dyeing through the Hebrew year: a Jewish dye kit and calendar
For my final challenge, I’ve zeroed in on Judaism as an earth-based religion and created a calendar of dye plants that come into season or are readily accessible during each month of the Jewish year. A series of dye cards paired with pre-mordanted (i.e. ready to dye) silk bandanas guide users through a full year of at-home dye projects, while an interactive calendar of concentric circles highlights the kabbalistic world associated with each season and reveals a blessing for each month drawn from tkhines, Yiddish women’s prayers written in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries.
Age: 28 Location: Somerville, MA www.binahdesign.com and www.etsy.com/shop/binahdesign
Bookmaking, Calligraphy, Woodworking, Typography, Printing.
Rachel Jackson is a Boston based artist, feminist and fair weather rock climber. She has a BA in Visual Art and a certificate in Bookbinding, and considers herself a Jackson of all trades, master of none. From collecting and drying leaves in the fall, huddled inside in the winter obsessing over calligraphy, outside doing cyanotype prints in the spring, or indigo dyeing in the summer, crafting is a total life obsession.
Week 1
Writing Your Own Destiny
Esther wrote her own Megillah! Inspired by my work as a scribe, I made a mask and jewelry set out of materials used to create holy scrolls (parchment, quills, ink). Let this be the year we all write our own destinies!
Week 2
Metal/Air
It’s easy to chase the latest tool or gadget, but it’s the breath and intention of the maker that truly makes the piece. I made an inflatable tower featuring drawings of the tools that I use. When you turn off the air, it crumples into nothing.
Week 3
Postcards for Peace
There is a tradition to greet 3 people when you welcome the new moon. You say “Shalom Aleichem” (may peace be upon you) and they respond “Aleichem Shalom” (and to you, peace). These postcards are a contemporary way to cultivate a pen pal of peace. Each month exchange the postcards, and at the end of the year, keep the wishes you were sent in the box they came in!
Week 4
Every Generation…
My grandfather’s Siddur is colored with drips of wine and happy memories, on the page containing Friday night kiddush. And with spring fast arriving, Pesach was on my mind. There is a tradition to use a drop of wine for each plague at the Seder. This book has 120 pages, each with the ten plagues. Mark each one with wine, and then pass it on to the next generation to continue. 120 years later, you will have a record of all the Seders!
Age: 37 Location: Denver, CO http://kavanah-arts.com/ and https://www.facebook.com/kavanahjewishart and https://www.linkedin.com/in/yehoshua-hooper-119aba11/ and https://www.instagram.com/kavanah_arts/ and https://www.pinterest.com/KavanahArts/_created/
Illustration & calligraphy would be my strongest – though I utilize and teach various mediums of the arts.
Yehoshua Hooper grew up being a third-culture kid, constantly exploring new places and creating art along the way. He received his MA in Jewish Education, Nonprofit Development, and Art Education at the Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS) in New York City. During his time at JTS, he was part of the artist residency program and worked at the Jewish Art Museum which fulled his passions for creating specialized programming on the Torah and the arts. While in Jerusalem, he studied at Pardes Institute of Jewish Studies, where he received a certification in experiential education and co-ran community studio workshops in Nachlaot. Now in Denver, Yosh runs online art workshops and has been the art director at Ramah-in-the-Rockies.
Week 1
Peeling the Klipah
I created this mask to represent the various experiences I’ve had during COVID and the process of shedding the attributes that kept me in the dark. It is a reminder, that when I put Hashem (Gd), I can shed the layers that is hindering me becoming the best version of myself. The mask has three layers, representing Nefesh, Ruah, and Neshama – the three levels of the soul in which we are given an opportunity to refine.
Week 2
For the Sake of Kodesh (Holiness)
This stained glass of a Shiviti – a visual meditative guide of a menorah utilized for contemplation over Hashem’s name (represented by the letter ‘Hei’) – was formed from four glass panels, each representing foreign sources/influences that I have given my attention to in the past or have struggle with.
Week 3
Kiddush Levana
Inspired by the scroll casing typically found with Megillah Esther – I found it a fitting idea especially concerning the New Moon and its light awaiting to be revealed. I wanted to create a piece that I could use each month. I used two layers of metal sheet and used a pomegranate design to represent the spring time.
Week 4
Sefirot Ha’Omer: A Visual Guide for the Soul
This is a time piece, an invitation for the viewer to utilize during the counting of the omer. The illustration conveys the message of this journey, focusing on the particular sefirot (attribute) of each week while contemplating who they stand before (Hashem). Spring time reflects renewal – an opportunity to become partners in creation and counting the omer is an act of preparation so one will be ready to receive the Torah.
