Art

Philadelphia Inquirer, Weekend Section, 5/21/04

Dear Diary, I'm Jewish. The Inez Storer exhibition at the National Museum of American Jewish History is packaged with a compelling narrative of how the California artist discovered her Jewish heritage in her mid-60's, just before her mother died.

Reared as a Catholic, Storer says she never felt "comfortable" in that religion. Jewish symbolism such as the menorah began to enter her paintings even before her mother revealed her family history, she adds.

The first section of the show, organized by the museum at Santa Clara University in California, addresses Storer's discovery.

The rest of the work is more generally about personal identity. Composed collage-style, ther paintings are filled with what curators often call "personal identity" -- that is, symbols that may be meaningless to anyone who doesn't know the artist.

Although she's over 70 and art-school trained, Storer paints in a faux-naive style one associates with self-taught artists. Her diaristic paintings are engaging in purely visual terms even when their meaning is obscure.

This is especially true of larger canvases such as The Conjurer, a man with a monocle holding a caged bird beneath a woman on a trapeze bar, and the luminescent Twist.

Storer, who has exhibited at the Snyderman Gallery in Old City, is a confessional artist. The maddening thing about her work is the fragmentary nature of her confessions, and the obscurity of their significance to the world at large.