Bianca Eshel-Gershuni (1932-2020) was a pioneering Israeli sculptor and jewelry designer known for challenging artistic conventions and redefining the boundaries between craft and fine art. In contrast to the dominant minimalist, conceptual, and abstract tendencies of her time, her work proposed an aesthetic of abundance—a profusion of materiality, color, narrativity, and personal expression—paving the way for generations of artists exploring gender, kitsch, and popular culture.

Mae Rockland Tupa (b. 1937) is an accomplished multimedia artist and author whose prolific work has helped shape the field of Jewish Americana. Her work, including papercuts, prints, and textiles, explores themes of Jewish identity, history, and culture. She has published seven books, including the pioneering 1973 text The Work of Our Hands: Jewish Needlecraft for Today. Her work is housed in the collections of numerous institutions, such as The Jewish Museum in New York City.

Eva Zeisel’s modernist ceramic work achieved major fame and critical success and even made waves during her early career in the Soviet Union. Upon moving to the United States, Zeisel experimented with feminine silhouettes in her pottery and gained widespread success for her artistry and design work.

Surrealist photographer Claude Cahun lived their life in a spirit of rebellion and defiance. From their precocious teenage years, defying conventional ideals of beauty and femininity with their shaven head and male attire, to their direct resistance of German occupying forces, they active worked against the suppression of liberty and freedom—a life of resistance. 

Through her socio-political artworks, Israeli painter Ruth Schloss (1922-2013) directed the viewer's attention to the human conditions of the downtrodden and marginalized in Israeli society from the 1940s through the early 2000s. She depicted figures and images people usually prefer to ignore, such as the poor and the unprivileged, the working class, newcomers, Mizrahi Jews, Palestinian refugees, the disastrous ruins of the wars in Israel, the Intifada in the occupied territories, women and children, newborns, and the elderly.