Meirav Ong (she/they) is an Ashkenazi-American transdisciplinary artist from Sharon, MA and based in Oakland, CA. Ong draws from her Jewish heritage as a framework to conceive of an embodied prayer practice that exists as an alternative to Judaism’s patriarchal structures. Her practice explores embodied prayer in relation to grief, Jewish mourning rituals, and Genetic Memory through textiles, clay, sound, performance and social practice. Ong holds an MFA in Fiber from Cranbrook Academy of Art and a BFA from University of Michigan. She has exhibited at The Everson Museum in Syracuse, NY, The Cranbrook Art Museum in Bloomfield Hills, MI, Mana Contemporary in Jersey City, NJ among others. Her work with community organizations includes The Zekelman Holocaust Center, Lab/Shul, and JFREJ among others. Her work has been published by AJS Perspectives, Ayin Press and No Tokens Journal. Ong is a cofounder of Well of Wills, a feminist collective creating art at the intersection of spirituality and activism and is currently the Artist in Residence of the East Bay JCC in Oakland, CA.
For all inquires please email meiravi.g@gmail.com // CV
My art is a practice of listening.
Listening as an act of resistance.
Listening as an act of defiance.
Listening as an act of re/connecting to our bodies.
Through surfacing seemingly lost histories of women-designed rituals and prayer practices, my work reveals the inherited traumas of Jewish women who have been pacified and silenced for generations by the patriarchal gatekeepers of Jewish law. My practice sanctifies the act of listening to mend the inherited traumas of this repression. I create sanctuaries for listening with textiles, clay, sound recordings and ritual-based performances.
As a maker, my handiwork is my prayer. The physical labor of my work – twisting, stretching, wrapping, pulling, gathering, tying, and knotting – are expressive acts of listening, a transmission of my ancestors’ embodied knowledge. I am twisting. I am stretching. I am pulling. I am gathering. I am unfolding. I work with materials which carry their own secrets and stories, like old bed sheets and discarded clothing, rocks and earth, inviting them as witnesses of generations past to voice their untold narratives. Listening, a seemingly counterintuitive response to being silenced, is a practice of empathy.
By examining grief through Jewish mourning rituals, Genetic Memory, and lost ancestral practices, my work seeks after a reparative intervention by and for non-male practices which function as a rejoinder to the powers that both have and continue to define and manage Jewish spiritual practices. While most recently my practice has responded to matters within Modern Orthodox Judaism, my work can be read more broadly as an indictment of and resistance to systemic discrimination against non-male voices within patriarchal systems. By subverting the silence of repression through curating experiences of intentional listening, my work transforms listening into an act of defiance and reclamation.