Gavi Weitzman is an artist, educator, and community organizer based in Philadelphia. She works across printmaking, painting, collage, and object-making to explore themes of embodiment, ritual, identity, and tradition. She graduated with honors from the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis, earning a BFA in Studio Art and Art History and Archaeology. Her work has been featured in exhibitions both online and in Pennsylvania and Indiana. In Spring 2022, she completed an apprenticeship at the Fabric Workshop and Museum. Her most recent work examines the relationship between hair and femininity, building on a body of work that engages with her Jewish heritage.
StatementOur bodies serve as vessels through which we express who we are and what we believe. The body is inscribed by the cultures and environments we inhabit. It is a site of tension, power, and reclamation—a visceral reflection of personhood. My work explores the blurred boundaries between beauty and disgust. Through printmaking, painting, collage, object making and self-portraiture, I use my body to investigate the complex dynamics of identity—specifically, the tension between internal and external perceptions, as well as the push and pull between tradition and modernity, societal expectations and personal aspirations. I use my body and image to reclaim the feminine as something to be seen, revered, and exalted. I make work for the Jewish women who didn’t have a chance to voice their thoughts, whose opinions weren’t recorded in books learned by their sons and grandsons. I make work for the women who thank God every day for giving them the ability to attract, repel, unite, and perceive.
PA
