Soltes, Ori Z.

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Soltes, Ori Z.

(Ori Soltes)

PERSONAL: Male.

ADDRESSES: Office—Department of Art, Music and Theater, Georgetown University, 1221 36th St. NW, Washington, DC 20057.

CAREER: Historian and educator. Georgetown University, Washington, DC, lecturer; former lecturer at Johns Hopkins and Cleveland State universities, and at Art Institute of Chicago, Smithsonian Institution, and Walters Art Gallery. Leads tours through Mediterranean basin.

AWARDS, HONORS: National Endowment for the Humanities, Fellowship in Syro-Palestinian Archaeology, American Schools of Oriental Research.

WRITINGS:

Realms between Realms: Histories between History, B'nai B'rith Klutznick National Jewish Museum (Washington, DC), 1997.

Ben-Zion: In Search of Oneself, B'nai B'rith Klutznick National Jewish Museum (Washington, DC), 1997.

The Circles of History and Jewish History, B'nai B'rith Klutznick National Jewish Museum (Washington, DC), 1997.

(Editor) National Treasures of Georgia, Foundation for International Arts and Education (Bethesda, MD), 1999.

Felix Lembersky: From Socialist Realism to Expressionism, 1942–1965 (essays), Uniterra Foundation (Cambridge, MA), 1999.

Dalya Luttwak Metal Art, 1980–2001, Dalya Luttwak (Chevy Chase, MD), 2001.

Fixing the World: Jewish-American Painters in the Twentieth Century, University Press of New England (Hanover, NH), 2003.

Our Sacred Signs: How Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Art Draw from the Same Source, Westview Press (New York, NY), 2005.

SIDELIGHTS: Ori Z. Soltes specializes in the art, religion, linguistics, and philosophy of ancient civilizations, including Greece and Rome, as well as the Christian, Jewish, and Muslim worlds. A lecturer at Georgetown University, he has taught at a number of institutions of higher learning and lectured at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Walker Art Gallery. He also leads tours of the Mediterranean basin. He has served as curator on numerous exhibits at the B'nai B'rith Klutznick National Jewish Museum, and worked on several resulting books as editor or author.

In Fixing the World: Jewish-American Painters in the Twentieth Century Soltes takes a look at the work of Jewish American artists in the wake of twentieth-century multiculturalism, determining the place of such works in the history of American art and its development. M. Elizabeth Boone, in a review for American Jewish History, noted that, "like some of the early books on other marginalized groups of artists, this book makes previously under-considered artists and artwork available for future scholars to think about and explore." Books & Culture contributor Mark Packer remarked that "the sweep of Soltes' study is nothing less than epic," and concluded that "the chief merit of his study consists rather in its panoramic and well-illustrated survey, and the aesthetic insight he brings to individual paintings when he describes their purely visual elements. At least as he handles the subject, the Jewishness of the artists included in this volume appears to be little more than an incidental fact about them."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

American Jewish History, December, 2002, M. Elizabeth Boone, review of Fixing the World: Jewish-American Painters in the Twentieth Century, p. 479.

Books & Culture, July-August, 2005, Mark Packer, "What Is Jewish Art?" (review of Fixing the World), p. 40.

Kirkus Reviews, September 1, 2005, review of Our Sacred Signs: How Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Art Draw from the Same Source, p. 964.