Her solo exhibition GOLEM: A Call to Action debuted at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco, CA in 2021-2022. Weitz’s artwork has been featured in Artforum, Art in America, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, BOMB, and Hyperallergic. Working across film, performance art, installation, drawing, and photography, her work synthesizes elements from Yiddish folktales, feminist performance art, clowning, and silent film to make powerful, and often political statements about the world and the project of humanity’s survival. ![]() Julie Weitz is an award-winning interdisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles. The project brings to light the firefighters’ contributions to protecting the lands and communities threatened by catastrophic wildfire in California and the systemic challenges they face, while also raising awareness about the need for more mental health education and resources for wildland firefighters and underrepresented communities at the front lines of the climate crisis. This year, UCI’s California Wildfire Project and the Department of Art History are hosting Weitz’s community-centered art initiative and oral history project, “Holy Sparks: Interviews with Wildland Firefighters,” which centers the voices and images of formerly incarcerated firefighters with the FFRP. Previously in 2019, Weitz received her basic wildland firefighter training at an artist residency program hosted by the University of California Berkeley’s Sagehen Creek Field Station in Tahoe National Forest (Washoe). In 2021, Weitz began teaching meditation, breathwork, and yoga to firefighters at The Forestry and Fire Recruitment Program (FFRP), a non-profit organization based in Pasadena, CA that provides career support to formerly incarcerated firefighters who are interested in careers in the Wildland and Forestry sector. Weitz’s talk and workshop are organized by UCI’s California Wildfire Project (CWP), as part of a year-long Living with Wildfire initiative. This quarter, Weitz will be leading a PFBF workshop event for UCI community members in conjunction Art History 140B, “Sublime Landscapes and the Changing Climate,” taught by Marianna Davison. At stake is the larger conviction that advocacy for traditional ecological knowledge, combined with ancient Jewish practices, can be a powerful means of healing and reshaping climate and land management policy.Ĭurrently, Weitz is developing Prayer for Burnt Forests (PFBF) into a community-centered event that stages interactive performances in forests impacted by wildfires to help affected communities across the American West process their grief through shared artistic experiences. As a diasporic justice-seeker, Golem adapts her culture’s ancient traditions with contemporary urgency, while honoring local communities, the land, and long-established local practices. In a modern twist, however, Golem’s fire is specifically a decolonizing “cultural fire,” which connects her religious awakening to California’s Indigenous practices of fire ecology. ![]() In Weitz’s videos, ecology is framed within the traditional Jewish concept of fire as a force for hope and as a foundational element in spiritual ritual. The film was commissioned by The Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco, as part of Weitz’s solo exhibition GOLEM: A Call to Action (2021-2022) which featured three video artworks that draw on Jewish allegory, folklore, and spiritual practice to confront societal and ecological disasters. In the film, a mythological golem traverses the recently-charred forests of Tongva land in Southern California, performing the prayer as a ritual dance. Together with Rabbi Zach Fredman, Weitz created a prayer intended to be read and delivered in nature as a gesture of respect, restoration, and genesis. Prayer for Burnt Forests is a film and public art initiative that extends upon the ethical imperative of tikkun olam (to heal the world) by upholding the land’s right to rest and recuperation. ![]() 2023 | 3:30 - 5 PM McCormick Screening Room 1070 Humanities Gateway.
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