Transversals: Reverberations Across Contested Lines

Dr. Paula Gerstenblatt
May 7 – June 25, 2026 2026

About This Exhibition

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
There is a field. I’ll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
The world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase each other
Doesn’t make sense.
-Rumi

This exhibition narrates a personal journey with a continued focus of the artist’s work on how the individual narrative anchors the collective, and vice versa. This series explores an emotionally charged landscape, juxtaposing and upending fixed and “righteous” perspectives to reveal the flexibility found in reoriented boundaries. Through a synthesis of historic and contemporary maps, personal photographs and text, and other archival sources, these works function as transversals – lines of inquiry across contested spaces. Dr. Gerstenblatt’s intention is not to represent one side or many sides, rather, to expand dialog as an artist/scholar whose visits to Israel over the past 49 years mark phases of her life that parallel milestones of the region, including the historic visit of Anwar Sadat to Jerusalem in 1977, when hope was palpable. While in tragic contrast to the current reality, perhaps we are called, in the spirit of James Baldwin, to “invent hope everyday.”

About the Artist