By DORIS RUBENSTEIN
The past 12 months have seen numerous out-of-town Jewish artists in various genres — like Lynne Avadenka’s letter press works (AJW, Oct. 2025) — come to visit us here in Minnesota, and it seems that the trend is continuing.
A venue that has always offered heimish hospitality to these Jewish artists is Form + Content Gallery. I’d venture to say that Form + Content was instrumental in making northeast Minneapolis into the hot spot for the arts that it is today.
The latest of these visiting artists is Rachel Leah Cohn, with her multimedia show “To Rejoin the Ocean.” This intensely colorful, multifaceted installation concerns themes of communication, mythology and rituals.
“This work began in a cold creek in Wisconsin in 2021,” Cohn said. “While at ACRE Residency in Boscobel, I was emerging from the isolation of the pandemic and deeply grateful to spend time each day in nature with new friends. Sitting in the water became a healing act, reconnecting us to our bodies, to one another and to the landscape. I came to understand the creek as a mikva, a Jewish ritual bath: a site of cleansing, purification and transformation. The physical sensation of cold water against my body offered an antidote to the loneliness of the previous year. Through ritual, the pool also connected me to an ancestral past and a long history of entering living waters and emerging renewed.”
Cohn describes herself as an “interdisciplinary artist” and creates works in wood, glass, ceramic, paint and more. Her subjects range from a very Jewish women’s schvitz to her intriguing-but-treif attempt to study the inner life of oysters.
How did Cohn come to such versatility?
Rachel Leah Cohn was born and raised in the Boston area. She did all the regular Jewish things: Bat Mitzva at the Needham Temple Beth Shalom, summers at Camp Young Judaea in New Hampshire. Her home life, however, was a bit different than that of many other campers.
Going back two generations, her grandmother escaped the Shoah on a Kindertransport that took her to Sweden. At the war’s end, she immigrated to pre-state Palestine. Cohn’s mom was born in Tel Aviv but at one point lived in Qatar, teaching at a pilot campus of Virginia Commonwealth University in Doha. It was no surprise then, that after receiving her BFA in painting from the renowned Rhode Island School of Design, Rachel Cohn went on to earn her MFA at VCU. Indiana has been her home for many years now, wooed there by the Ball State University School of Art, in Muncie, Ind., where she was instrumental in developing its Four Dimensions Foundations program of interdisciplinary arts such as mixed-media of video, sound and animation.
Such talent has taken Cohn far. She has traveled nationally and internationally, including to the Contemporary Art Museum of Indianapolis, ACRE Gallery in Chicago, Satellite Art Fair in Miami, Terrain Biennial in Springfield, Ill., Massey University in New Zealand, Qatar Museums, the Istanbul Design Biennial in Turkey and Atelierhaus Salzamt, Austria.
She has attended many artist residency programs, including Arteles Creative Center, Vermont Studio Center, ACRE Projects in Wisconsin, Otis College of Art and Design and the Fire Station in Qatar.
In these times of intense stress and anxiety in our state, a visit to experience “To Rejoin the Ocean” is a great idea to get away from it all without leaving town. All of the artwork, and particularly the main attraction (I won’t spoil the unexpected surprise for those who want to attend), immerses the viewer — or shall I say the “participant”? — in a mood all-enveloping in its tranquility.
Is it a mikva? Not really, since it is unquestionably a place that speaks clearly to women; in fact, some men who visit a mikva might find it embarrassing. Is it Miriam’s Well? No, because wells are in the ground, and this elevates the eye and the spirit.
If you want to find out what it’s all about, you’ll have a chance to ask the artist herself. Cohn will be at Form + Content Gallery, 210 N. Second St., Minneapolis, for an artist talk from 4 to 6 p.m, Saturday, March 28. Her artworks will be on view through March 28. For information, go to: formandcontent.org.
(American Jewish World, March 2026)
