Elizabeth Bloom

My on-going work, Lamentation/Jubilation consists of two installations of many individual portraits whose placement shifts as I continue to add new images to the series. As of now, I have completed 54 portraits.

Initially, I painted Lamentation to express my reaction to the tragedy of September 11th. As I worked on the images, the world situation worsened. Knowing my subject was universal and historical, I wanted to make a more global statement against war, hatred and intolerance. I juxtaposed portraits in a symbolic way. For example, next to a grief stricken Palestinian woman, is an Israeli man in a state of shock; next to a black woman is a white woman whose gestures of grief are identical; next to a stoic elderly woman is a crying young child.

Jubilation is the antidote to the sadness and grief in Lamentation. It depicts the faces of family members, friends and others expressing happiness and amusement in all their varied manifestations.

Lamentation/Jubilation exemplifies the opposite extremes of human emotion. In painting these two bodies of work, I have portrayed aspects of the human condition that we all experience and that remind us that despite our differences, we are all essentially the same.

Elizabeth Bloom is a visual artist, teacher and curator. She attended the famed Barnes Foundation in Merion, PA where she studied art history and aesthetics. She also studied painting and drawing at Fleisher Art Memorial in Philadelphia, where she won the Gimbel Excellence Award for Painting.

While living on the east coast, Bloom won numerous portrait commissions and exhibited her work at art institutions and galleries including The Philadelphia Art Alliance, The Hahn Gallery, Museum of the Philadelphia Civic Center and a traveling Smithsonian exhibition, American Drawings '76. She also received the Founder's Award at the Woodmere Art Museum.

Bloom moved to Los Angeles in 1980. She has exhibited paintings at many local venues including Loyola University Law School Galleries, Grossmount College, Brand Library, Hebrew Union College, InCollaboration Gallery and the University of Judaism. She recently exhibited her work at Insel Gallery, Berlin, Germany.

Her work is included in the collections of UCLA Medical Center, CBS Studios, American Jewish University, Midway Hospital and in many private collections.

From 1991-94, Bloom was a Visiting Artist for the Getty-sponsored Institutes for Educators in the Visual Arts where she gave workshops and lectures. Bloom was a judge for the BRAVO Award for Achievement in the Arts from 1994-2000. From 2005-2013 she was curator of the Platt/Borstein Galleries at American Jewish University in Los Angeles.