Exhibit: Sacred and Ordinary… Joyful Works from Jewish Tradition and Everyday Life
By Julie Wohl
In the Bodzin Art Gallery through October 19, 2026
Julie Wohl wears many hats. As an artist, her work features motifs that showcase her inner life and musings as she grapples with 2,000 years of Jewish history and culture. Julie’s vibrant mixed media works include paint, collage, and fiber art dolls, all boldly demonstrating her love of Judaism and storytelling.
Julie also loves teaching and currently serves as the Director of Congregational Learning at Baltimore Hebrew Congregation. She’s also the founder of The Studio, a Jewish text-based community art studio that meets monthly. Julie is accomplished at facilitating artmaking for both skilled artists and those who have no arts experience at all.
I encourage everyone to meet this fun artist and make your own mixed-media creation at the J on Tuesday, October 13, 7:00 pm – 9:00 pm, for Make, Create, Celebrate: A High Holiday Mixed Media Art Workshop led by Julie Wohl.
Here, Julie shares some insights into her art and inspiration.
When did you start making art and what keeps you going? Has Judaism always inspired your work?
I have always made art in one form or another. My mother and grandmother were both artists, and art supplies were always around in my house. I filled sketchbooks, doodled on the sides of my math homework, and painted the walls of my bedroom. Basically, I made art any chance I could, on whatever surface was available.
I formally got into painting at a summer program when I was 16 and that has been my primary medium ever since. Judaism was a later addition to my practice. Starting in college, I remember being moved by Debbie Friedman songs and wanting to paint the ideas. I went to graduate school for Jewish education, and I was very interested in connecting the ideas and spirit of the tradition with my work as an educator and an artist, though I did not fully know how that would manifest.
By the time I started working full time in Jewish education, I was creating my own work as well as running workshops and seminars in which my art and my Jewish expression were inextricably intwined.
You work across media, such as painting, digital illustration, and soft sculpture. How do you decide what to make with which materials?
I think of myself primarily as a painter, and all of my work – including the soft sculpture and the digital illustration – include painting or painting style as a major component. I taught myself to sew on my mom’s old sewing machine just so I could have different shaped surfaces on which to paint. I love to work large and painting is, at least for me, the best way to do that.
When I wanted to delve into book illustration, one of the biggest learning curves for me was creating the same image, or character, over and over again. My style is very loose and intuitive, which is great for painting, but does not work so well if you need to be consistent.
That is why I taught myself to work in Procreate on the iPad. It allowed me to work much faster, to play with layers in a different way, and to eventually, with a lot of practice and a steeper learning curve than I expected, be more consistent. I find digital illustration to be faster and more efficient for creating usable resources, including book illustrations, posters, and graphics.
The soft sculpture art dolls are a departure for me since I have always worked primarily in two dimensions. I find that sewing and working with fabric, yarn, thread, and other materials brings me to a totally different mental space than painting on canvas or drawing in Procreate. Making the dolls has become an almost therapeutic experience for me.
I also really like that in an age of artificial everything, the physical act of sewing, stuffing, painting, and constructing feels countercultural and grounding. Plus, I’m still learning this medium, so every final piece is a bit of a surprise, which is stimulating for me as a creator.
You’re a published author and illustrator. Tell us more about your book, “Make, Create, Celebrate: Jewish Holidays Through Art.” Did putting words to your process as you wrote your book inform your craft at all?
“Make, Create, Celebrate: Jewish Holidays Through Art” is part art journal and part Jewish holiday resource book. In it, we explore the Jewish year through the arts—both by looking at and thinking about visual art and creating art through various media and modalities. I wrote it after having done Jewish artmaking workshops for about a decade, so in many ways it was putting into words the work that I had been already doing.
I have found throughout the years of teaching my workshops that I will often push myself to come up with a new way of doing something, or I will try to find a different medium that I think will appeal to a broader audience. Those ideas will often find their way into my own work. Some examples of this are watercolor resist, Gelli printing, and collage making—all of which I taught myself because I thought they would be interesting to my students. In the end, they became things that I fell in love with and regularly incorporate into my own art.
What advice do you have for aspiring artists?
My biggest piece of advice for aspiring artists is to just make art. Do it. Do it badly. Do it when you think you have no time for it. You don’t have to be good at it, you don’t have to want to make money off it, and you don’t have to invest huge amounts of money into it. You don’t even have to post it on social media!
If you have paper and a pen or pencil, or maybe some markers and a glue stick, you can draw, doodle, rip, or cut. Just do whatever comes to you, and try as hard as you can not to judge yourself while you are doing it.
It is a very human thing to make art. Just like you don’t have to aspire to be a famous athlete to go to the gym, you don’t have to “be an artist” to make art. You are allowed to do it just because it feels good, and you are allowed to throw it out or repurpose it if you don’t like how it turns out. The only thing I suggest you do is just make art.