visual art - ARTES VISUALES - Artes Visuais

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Lasar Segall (b. 1891) was a Lithuanian-born artist who settled permanently in Brazil in 1923. His work fused Expressionism and Cubism to explore Jewish suffering, emigration, and the landscapes and social contrasts of his adopted country. A committed modernist, he co-organized the landmark Semana de Arte Moderna and founded the Sociedade Pro Arte Moderna, until Brazilian fascist pressure targeting foreigners — especially Jews — forced it apart.

Franz Weissmann (b. 1911) was an Austrian-born sculptor who emigrated to Brazil at age eleven. He was one of the founders of the Neo-Concrete Movement, a short-lived but influentimial Brazilian movement calling for greater sensuality and color in concrete art. He developed a constructivist style favoring geometric shapes made of iron, steel wire, and aluminum. In 1970, he was named best sculptor by the Brazilian Association of Art Critics.

Gego (Gertrud Goldschmidt, b. 1912) was a German-born artist who fled Nazi Germany and emigrated to Venezuela, where she became a leading figure of mid-century Venezuelan abstraction. Trained in architecture and engineering, she developed a distinctive geometric approach through sculpture, drawing, and collage, working primarily in delicate steel wire to explore line and space. Her sculptures challenged the conventions of static art through parallax: though fixed, they appear to move as the viewer does. 

Mira Schendel (b. 1919) was a Swiss-born artist of Jewish heritage. She was raised Roman Catholic in Italy, but Fascist laws stripped her of her citizenship because of her Jewish heritage. She spent a decade of displacement across multiple countries before setting in Brazil in 1949. Working in rice paper, acrylic, sculpture, and text drawn from multiple languages and scripts, her art treated language as simultaneously physical, poetic, and resistant to fixed meaning, constantly dissolving the boundary between drawing and sculpture, legibility and abstraction.

Frans Krajcberg (b. 1921) was a Polish-born painter, sculptor, engraver, and photographer who lost his family to the Holocaust. After moving to São Paulo in 1948 and participating in the first São Paulo Biennial, he found solace in the natural world, mixed-medium art, and environmental advocacy. He denounced the destruction of Brazil's forests, making repeated trips to the Amazon and Pantanal to photograph deforestation and gather materials — burnt wood, roots, charred tree trunks — for his sculptures. 

José Gurvich (b. 1927) was a Lithuanian-born artist whose family fled religious persecution for Montevideo in 1932. His early style was flat planes of primary color or black and white. His work grew increasingly dynamic, favoring spiral compositions filled with fantastical imagery, symbols, and text, and has been compared to Marc Chagall. A lifelong preoccupation with Jewish identity runs through his work. He traveled through Europe and Israel, painting murals on a kibbutz and documenting Israeli pastoral life and Yiddish culture.

Arnold Belkin (b. 1930) was born in Canada to European Jewish immigrants. Trained as an artist in western Canada but unmoved by its landscape-focused tradition, he was inspired by images of Diego Rivera's work in a magazine to move to Mexico at eighteen. He focused his career on murals, pioneering a format he called the "portable mural" to adapt the form to modern architecture. Most of his work lives in public and educational spaces, keeping muralism's tradition of communicating with the masses.

Baruj Salinas (b. 1935) was a Cuban-born artist of Sephardic Jewish heritage who settled permanently in Miami after leaving Cuba following the 1959 revolution. Trained as an architect at Kent State University, his art incorporated Abstract Expressionism, with an ethereal, lustrous, almost mystical visual language. A co-founder of Grupo GALA — the first Latin American artist association in Florida — he was also a foundational figure in establishing Miami as a center for Latin American art.

Marta Minujín (b. 1943) is a Buenos Aires-born artist who became a leading figure in performance and participatory art across the world. Radicalized by the New Realism movement in France, she staged provocative works across Buenos Aires in the mid-1960s. Her most enduring works operate at the intersection of art and political life: the 1983 Parthenon of Books, assembled from 30,000 titles banned by Argentina's military dictatorship and dismantled so the books could be returned to the public, remains her defining monument.

Aurora Levins Morales (b. 1954) is a Puerto Rican–Ashkenazi writer, visual artist, poet, and historian. Drawing on the Latin American tradition of testimonio, her work moves across poetry, essay, and visual art to excavate suppressed histories and reframe them as tools for political and collective imagination. A major voice in Women of Color feminism, diasporic Jewish culture, and disability justice, she treats history as raw material to be transformed until it shifts how people understand the world they live in.

Mirta Kupferminc (b. 1955) is an Argentine Jewish printmaker and visual artist born in Buenos Aires to two survivors of Auschwitz. For four decades she has worked across etching, mezzotint, sculpture, and painting to interrogate memory, identity, history, and language — weaving together Holocaust inheritance, Argentine history, and Kabbalistic symbolism into a singular iconographic language. Her work holds the highest artistic distinction in Argentina and is exhibited internationally.

Felipe Goifman (b. 1966) is a Belo Horizonte–born photographer, writer, and documentarian whose work chronicles Jewish life and migration across Brazil and South America. The grandson of immigrants from Czernowitz, Ukraine, his books and films trace Jewish settlement region by region — Rio de Janeiro's synagogues, the bnei anussim of Pernambuco, Moroccan Jewish families who followed the rubber trade deep into the Amazon. Goifman approaches each community as a distinct chapter in a larger account of how Jewish life shaped, and was shaped by, the country it entered.

Aliza Nisenbaum (b. 1977) is a Mexico City–born painter of Russian Jewish descent whose career in portraiture began in 2012 when Tania Bruguera invited her to teach English to undocumented migrants in Queens. The relationships she built there led to portraits of her students and their families, and established the method she has worked in since — forming intimate, extended relationships with her "sitters." Her large-scale, saturated canvases depict workers, immigrants, and others who are rarely the subject of portraiture.

Yaron Michael Hakim (b. 1980) is a Bogotá-born, Los Angeles–based painter whose work addresses assimilation, cultural hybridity, and the experience of living between worlds. Working on recycled sailcloth, he produces dense, surrealistic depictions of flora and fauna that use the language of natural history as a framework for examining identity, exoticization, and belonging. The boundary between self and other, human and animal, becomes the primary site of inquiry. 

Karen Dana Cohen (b. 1982) is a Mexico City–born, Chicago-based artist working in drawing, painting, and sculpture. Her practice centers on the experience of inhabiting a body in contexts where it is marked as foreign — examining the structures of belonging and exclusion, the friction of translation, and the negotiation of home and place. She holds an MFA from Hunter College and has exhibited nationally and internationally.

Alex Woz is an Argentine Jewish artist. Raised around persistent antisemitic harassment, he spent years absorbing hostility toward an aspect of his identity he hadn't yet claimed for himself — a dynamic he later recognized as internalized antisemitism. After reconnecting with Jewish practice and community in his early twenties, he began making work in 2021 that uses photo collage — assembled from archival and antiquated photographs of Jewish people — to counter the stereotypes and propaganda that have shaped how Jews are seen, and how they see themselves. 

Margo Rivera-Weiss (b. 1960) was a Peruvian-Jewish American painter born to a Peruvian father and a Jewish American mother. Based in Oakland, they spent nearly two decades at the Women's Cancer Resource Center — first as librarian, then as Community Engagement Manager — using art as a tool for inclusion and programming for women of color, non-binary, gender non-conforming, and trans people. They also founded the JanRae Community Art Center and taught a monthly sketchbook class. They called their art style Tropical Expressionism. 

Veronica Mijelshon is a Buenos Aires–born architect and glass jewelry designer. She brings structural thinking to wearable objects — combining glass with rubber, metal, and textiles through flameworking, glassblowing, casting, and fusing. Her designs are shaped by an architectural training that instilled a rigorous attention to geometry and balance, and a childhood spent in her father's workshop handling industrial materials. The result is work that holds contrasts in tension — strength against fragility, transparency against reflection, organic form against geometric precision.

Alejandro Glatt is a third-generation Ashkenazi Jewish Mexican artist and the creator of GLATT KOSHER POP ART, a practice that merges Jewish identity, pop culture, and spiritual storytelling. His work spans paintings, mezuzahs, and installations, and has been exhibited internationally including at Miami Art Basel Week and the Jerusalem Biennale. In 2024 he became the first Mexican Jewish artist to send work to the Moon through the Artemis/Lunaprise mission.

Mónica Czukerberg is a Mexico City–based painter and sculptor who trained as an architect before expanding her practice through drawing and fashion. Working in what she calls "abstract realism," she draws on Mexican landscapes, light, and organic forms, situating them in invented, undefined settings that emerge from her creative process rather than direct observation. Her architectural training shapes an underlying attention to geometric structure, held in tension with the fluid, organic elements that characterize her canvases. 

Lucila Lagrú is an Argentinian Jewish artist working with ink, printmaking, and embroidery. Her work combines Yiddish and Hebrew text, self-portraiture, and symbolic imagery to explore grief, connection, memory, and repair. She studied visual arts at the Instituto Universitario Nacional del Arte (IUNA) and UMSA in Buenos Aires.

Ronit Levin Delgado is a multidisciplinary artist and curator, and a Fulbright Scholar. Her mother fled antisemitism in Soviet Moldova for Israel and met her father, a Paraguayan musician of mixed Jewish and Guaraní Native American heritage, when his band performed in Israel. Working across site-specific installation, interactive performance, video, painting, and sculptural objects, her practice centers on the body as a site of ritual — exploring vulnerability, desire, and intimacy as entry points into collective experience. 

Gerardo Blumenkrantz is a Brooklyn-based illustrator and visual artist born in Argentina, who came to the US right after high school. He works at the intersection of storytelling, humor, and image-making — using what he describes as a deceptively light-handed comic sensibility to reach deeper emotional territory. In 2012 he was awarded a Sendak Fellowship by Maurice Sendak himself, given to outstanding visual storytellers. 

Tali Levine is a Mexico City–born, Miami-based painter and mixed media artist. She works primarily in acrylic, oil, and embroidery — often interweaving the three — to produce hyperrealistic depictions of the natural world. Her work operates at the edge of legibility, using technical precision to generate wonder rather than mere accuracy: the question of how something was made becomes part of the experience of looking at it. You can shop her art on Etsy!