An Artist Amongst War: How Andi Arnovitz Turns Survival into Story

By Karina Michel Feld

Intimes of war, the world often sees the headlines and political narratives. What it rarely sees is the quiet, deeply human reality unfolding inside homes, inside families and inside the hearts of those still creating.

Artist Andi Arnovitz is one of those voices.

Writing from Jerusalem, her words are not filtered through distance. Between the sirens, sleepless nights, and moments of unexpected beauty, Andi continues to create, document, and reflect. Her art and her voice offer something rare: a window into resilience, fear, humor, and humanity, all coexisting at once.

In this conversation, we explore what it means to be an artist within war.

Arnovitz lives and works in Jerusalem, Israel. She is a conceptual artist, using etching, digital information and various printmaking processes, as well as fabric, thread and even porcelain to create both print series, artist books and large-scale installations.

These pieces explore various tensions that exist within religion, gender and politics.

Andi has exhibited her work all over the world.. She has had many one-woman shows and participated in multiple group shows. Her work is in many private collections in both the United States and in Europe, as well as major universities, museums and institutions, including the US Library of Congress, The Jewish Museum in New York, the Israel National Library, The Museum of Art in Ein Harod, The Israel Museum, The Tel Aviv

Museum, The Israel Knesset, Yeshiva University Museum, The Anu Museum, Yale University, UCLA, and The Smithsonian Museum of American History.

https://andiarnovitz.com/

https://www.instagram.com/andi_arnovitz/

Can you share what daily life feels like right now where you are?

The routine for me now is almost normal. My Pilates studio is open. The grocery store is full (technically, the grocery stores have been full and abundant except for the very beginning of the war, the week after October 7, when everyone was in shock and trucks and things weren’t moving.) Here is a picture from October 8, 2023:

Today coffee shops are full. My etching studio ( the Jerusalem Print Workshop) is back and open. Restaurants are full and taking reservations. Since the ceasefire, most museums and public institutions are open. The movie theaters are open. The malls are open.

But.

First of all, this is Jerusalem, not the north, not Tel Aviv and not the south, which have taken the brunt of the missiles and onslaught. We have had some semblance of normal even in the midst of the worst of it. Yet last night I sat with a dear friend, who told me she spent this last weekend in Tel Aviv and the city was humming with life: the beaches were full, the cafes were teeming, the restaurants packed, streets full of life. I feel pretty secure in saying I know of no other more resilient society than ours. Israelis have a specific gene for “bouncing back.”

I am calmer now because my grandchildren are back in school. You know the saying “You are only as happy as your least happy child?” Well, for six weeks, there was nothing- absolutely nothing for these children to do, and you couldn’t go far without mapping out the nearest bomb shelter and yet, their parents were expected to keep up with work; it was unsustainable and made for outrageous stress levels. I felt for them. We tried to help, but as I wrote in one of my posts, there is only so much play-doh and puzzles and coloring books you can buy.

What there isn’t is certainty.

No one knows how long this will last. It isn’t over and Iran is already trying to recover their missile storage and launchers. We have a trip planned in May. This is the same trip we were going to take last June when the first Iran bombardment started, so this would be the second attempt to go. There is a certain crumbling of trust in the future that we feel. That makes for a miserable sort of wakefulness at 3 am.

How does living in this reality impact you emotionally as an artist?

It is really hard to concentrate. I find my attention span is now about 45 minutes. Whereas before I could sit and sew or work on something for several hours at a time, I fidget now. It’s just really hard to stay focused. There is also the reality here that exhibitions have been canceled and postponed. And the worst part of this is the feeling that Israeli artists are not welcome abroad. We’ve been canceled. When I look at residency calls or exhibition calls, I pay attention to who is issuing them and where they are coming from. There are many other smaller museums in the states, many of them wonderful, but they do not have the budget nor staffing that the NYC Jewish Museum does. The small Jewish museums in Europe are still doing exhibitions, but again, smaller and less frequently. So that is also a bitter pill to swallow. I love making the work, but if no one ever sees it, that is a pity.

Do you find inspiration or create differently during this time?

Absolutely. Immediately after October 7, I could not, would not make anything. I had two sons and three sons-in-law, all called up into the war. Four of them in combat units. I was both numb and an emotional mess, and on autopilot. There were eleven grandchildren and five women without their husbands, some of them with brand new babies. My third daughter had a preemie, and a month after he was born, her husband was badly wounded and lost an eye in Gaza. We were taking her other two kids to school, feeding them and bathing them at night, so she could travel back and forth to Tel Aviv to the hospital with this preemie baby. It was a nightmare.

My oldest son missed the first four months of his first son’s life. So I had no energy to work. Eventually however, artists have to make. It’s like breathing. So the first thing I did was create an artist book called “Silent Witnesses.” I gave myself thirty minutes a day to do a watercolor, and this project is the result of that. I also needed time to process what had happened on October 7. Events need to percolate for artists. Next came “The Trees Saw Everything.” which came out of my need to memorialize all the victims of the Nova festival. (This was purchased by the State of Israel for the Knesset collection) these were kids my youngest son’s age. It could easily have been him. Hersh Goldberg-Polin and my youngest son went to high school together. (Note that my youngest son has had eleven men he knew from high school- who have all been killed since October 7.) Then I started creating in a bigger way and did other projects like “Evidence” and “A Robe for Rachel” which has been on view at the Anu Museum in Tel Aviv and then “Displaced II” which is in the Tel Aviv Biennale about to open next week. I have a prayerbook I have been sewing, in which for every day a man in our family has served in this war, I sew the prayer for the IDF in it. Our family alone has served almost 1300 days. It is not finished because they are still serving. So there are all kinds of inspiration and even terrible things can push artists to respond. And I feel lucky; I have a way to process and literally purge some of my angst in a material way.

What moments have stayed with you the most during this period? I know you shared a photo of the shelter during the Pilates class. Are there other moments like these you could share and help us understand what’s it’s like to be there right now?

There are so very many moments. When October 7 happened, and the sons and sons in law I love so much were all gone fighting in Gaza and the North, I remember looking at the blood orange tree in our garden. The oranges were green. And I remember asking myself, who would be alive and what would the world look like when those oranges ripened? Little did I know that I would be asking myself that for more than one season.

Starting micro- with my little four walls.

A house overrun by women.

Women and children.

Here is how war affects women:

We pick off the gel nails chip by chip.

Pull hang nails.

Eat too much chocolate and drink too much wine at night after the kids go to sleep.

Or…Stop eating or

Forget to eat.

Eating carbs. Tons of carbs because hey, you never know what tomorrow will bring.

Skip periods. Get periods early- cycles out of whack.

Nursing mothers milk dries up or goes way down.

We have diarrhea or are constipated, as now no mother can go the bathroom alone.

Drink too much coffee.

Want to go sleep at 9:30.

Buy too much of something and then forget the things we really need.

Scroll through Instagram listlessly, all the things we used to love looking at suddenly appearing ridiculous.

Lose our tempers easily.

Slowly but surely losing grip on the ability to limit TV time with little ones.

Checking our phones every five minutes.

Waiting for WhatsApps from husbands/sons.

Waiting

Waiting for so much. The war to start, the worst to come, the war to end.

The children:

Afraid to take baths (sirens might go off)

Afraid to go down the slide in the park (sirens might go off)

Wetting the bed at night

Refusing to go to bed alone

Tantrums over ridiculous things

Stopping napping

Napping for hours

Needing pacifiers (again)

Asking where Daddy is (over and over)

Meltdowns over small things

Listening far too carefully to grown up conversations…

sleeping in bomb shelters

These are small, small things. I know. But this is how life has changed. This is the micro, the zoom-in, the narrow focus. This is me watching my daughters and daughters in law.

This is the pin I wore every day and changed every day until the last living hostage came home.

This is the alert we get on our phones: I cannot tell you how many dozens and dozens of these I have gotten, and the folks in the north have received hundreds:

or how about this image… the mundane still life during war- take out dinner with one of my sons’ guns…

I have a huge fat folder of images… I’ll finish with one I took of not even all my kids crammed into our bomb shelter during an attack:

How has this experience changed your understanding of safety and home?

What a totally brilliant and sensitive question. Remarkably, I feel safe almost all the time. Again, Jerusalem is a bit buffered- a bubble if you will. I have the luxury of living in a relatively safe city and even more than that- the ultimate luxury of having our own mamad in our own home. I honestly do not feel unsafe almost all the time. I have to admit, I am a bit careless and reckless with some of the missile attacks: not closing our mamad door tightly, sometimes leaving before the formal all clear is given. What I don’t feel anymore, is that I can keep my kids and grandkids emotionally safe. We are all traumatized. I have a granddaughter who was visiting grandparents in the center of the country in 2023 a few months into the war and they were on a playground and there was no bomb shelter when the siren went off. Her parents (my kids) panicked and that trauma went straight to my granddaughter who had a horrible stutter for almost four months. It gradually went away, but I do not think any of us can know how deep is the trauma and sense of being “unsafe” and how long it is going to take to heal.

Home, however for me has just reinforced how very lucky I am. That’s why so much of my art deals with the loss of home. My home is our anchor, the cozy, embracing place where we gather, where we sit in the garden, where we weather this insanity outside. The war has just drilled down how lucky and privileged I am to have my home intact and here.

What does fear look like in your everyday life right now?

There are several kinds of fear. Real life-threatening fear, I do not feel very much. I never have. I myself feel pretty safe. I was desperately, sleeplessly afraid for my sons and sons-in-laws when they were fighting. Today my fears are more philosophical. Will our leaders manage this war properly, will they end it when we can be guaranteed safety for years to come?

How do you hold onto normalcy — or do you?

We do, we are all trying to hold onto normal. It is easier for me. I work from home. My kids are grown. For me, normal is cooking, taking walks, making things, spending time with my family, my mom and children and grandchildren and that kind of normal costs nothing and you do not need to go anywhere to make it happen. Celebrating Shabbat- that weekly rhythm also makes for a sense of normal. Even when we could not go to synagogue because the bomb shelter could not hold everyone, lighting candles, singing, inviting friends and family to dinner, that made for normal. It is enough for me.

What role do you believe art plays in times like this?

I think the saying “ A picture paints a thousand words” is very appropriate. Artists can convey the pain , the fear and the anguish we have been through with a single image. Art can help us heal, it can remind us how resilient we are, it can bring us together and it can help people recognize things they are not yet able to put into concrete ideas or actions. I think artists respond in real time to life, faster and more available than other art forms.

Through everything, what keeps you going?

My husband. His deep love for this country and his ability to put these days in historical perspective. He calms me down. My children and grandchildren remind me that the future could be better and brighter — we must both hope and work for that. My art keeps me sane. And this country, this beautiful, wounded and fractured country keeps me going because I know what it can be. I know one day the truth will be known by everyone. I know the twenty somethings who hate us so much today will grow up and realize they had it so wrong, and they understood so little of how the world works. I know we Jews are the opposite of evil, that there is a plan and our job is to try no matter what to fix this crazy unbalanced world. And I believe we will.