Estee will engage in a daily study and comics journaling practice with Mesilat Yesharim, an 18th century Mussar text by Rabbi Moshe Chaim Luzzato. Using ink and digital technologies as tools, Estee will embrace the conventions of graphic novel memoirs and document background research, study sessions, and reflections as a highly personalized account of Mussar study. Estee’s project will explore themes of narrative structure and metaphor, while also examining tensions between verbal and visual representations of Jewish texts and belief systems. The resulting artifact will illustrate the incorporation of ethical texts into lived experiences, and provide a commentary on the dynamics of Jewish learning itself.
Four-Panel Parsha: Parashat Vaetchanan (c) Estee Ellis, 2022.
Detail from "Marble Necks and Blunted Blows: A Dvar Torah Comic" (c) Estee Ellis, 2022.
MusART is an artist-in-residence program developed by the Emmy Noether Junior Research Group “Jewish Moralistic Writings (Musar) of the Early Modern Period: 1600–1800” and funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG).