That’s Not Land, That’s Sky
Anna Fine Foer
About Anna Fine Foer
Anna decided she was going to be an artist when she was 11-when she lived in Paris for a summer, visiting every museum.While a fibers major at Philadelphia College of Art she became fascinated by the relationship between maps and the land they represent.After emigrating to Israel, Anna worked as a textile conservator in Haifa and Tel-Aviv. She studied at the Courtauld Institute in London, where she received an advanced degree in Textile Conservation. Back in the US, Anna worked for the Textile Museum in Washington, D.C and as a freelance conservator. At the same time, she continued to construct collage landscapes with scientific, political and meta-physical significance, depicting three or more dimensions on a two-dimensional plane.Anna lives in Baltimore and has two adult sons. Her work has been exhibited at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, the Maryland Governor’s Mansion, and the Israeli Embassy and is in the collection of the Haifa Museum of Art and the Beer-Sheva Biblical Museum. She was awarded a prize for the Encouragement of Young Artists for work exhibited in the Artist’s House in Jerusalem and received a Maryland State Arts Council grant for Individual Artists in 2008, 2016 and 2021.
About That’s Not Land, That’s Sky
2021 20”h, 16”w, collage and gouacheThis collage is inspired by the practice of shmita, a shabbat for the land. Every seven years, the torah commands growers in Israel to let the land rest, go fallow. This practice allows farmers to take time away from their usual tasks and immerse themselves in torah study.In modern times, observant farmers have improvised; found ways to grow produce that does not impact the land, using hydroponic methods, as one way to get around the prohibition. A combination of ancient and modern agricultural practices are depicted. With the prohibition in a Shmita year against harvesting anything that is grown in the Land in Israel, I present a workaround. These arches, complete with photovoltaic tiles, are growing fields that are not rooted in the land, rather, they are planted in the sky. The aerial growing fields also provide shade from the sun, where one can rest to study Torah, an important element of the Shmita year. The collage was made on repurposed paper and a part of an earlier collage about Shmita that was not successful. All the collage elements are from my numerous files of topographic maps of Israel. No new materials were used, nothing was copied nor printed in the making of this artwork.
