Visual Artist

Anna Fine Foer

BALTIMORE, USA

Anna decided to become an artist at age 12, during a summer spent in Paris visiting every museum and gallery she could. As a fibers and crafts major at the Philadelphia College of Art, she developed a fascination with the relationship between maps and the landscapes they represent, sparking a lifelong interest in depicting topography and terrain through collage.

After emigrating to Israel, Anna worked as a textile conservator in Haifa and Tel Aviv. She studied at the Textile Conservation Centre, Courtauld Institute in London, where she received a Post-Graduate Diploma in Textile Conservation. Back in the US, Anna worked in conservation for the Textile Museum in Washington, D.C and for many museum clients as a freelance textile conservator. At the same time, she continued to construct collage landscapes with scientific, political and metaphysical significance, depicting three or more dimensions on a two-dimensional plane.

Anna now lives in Baltimore and has two adult sons. Her work has been exhibited at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, the National Institutes of Health and the Israeli Embassy and is in the permanent collection of the Haifa Museum of Art and the Beer-Sheva Biblical Museum and many other prestigious venues. She was awarded a prize for the Encouragement of Young Artists for work exhibited in the Artist’s House in Jerusalem and received a Maryland State Arts Council grant for Individual Artists in 2008, 2016 and 2021.

What are you making right now?

My current collage work combines artificial intelligence, Jewish mysticism, and the ethics of creation. It draws on the golem of 16th-century Prague—a figure shaped from clay and animated by sacred Hebrew inscription, built to protect, yet decommissioned when it outgrew its maker's intent—alongside Shelley's Frankenstein, whose creature embodies the same danger of creation. These narratives mirror our present relationship to AI: a technology of immense creative capacity that risks eclipsing the hands that shaped it. My methodology treats language as an animator, echoing how sacred inscription once brought clay to life. I prompted AI to generate invented "Golem code” and the code for a Golem’s DNA, translated it into Hebrew, and embedded it within layered collages, fusing mystical text with machine syntax to interrogate what it means to author a body, a self, or a system.

What medium do you work in and what drew you to it?

I was in the Fibre Department in art school and learned a lot about flat patterns, whether woven or surface design. In my final semester, I was in a painting class where we were instructed to tear up coloured papers as design inspiration. Instead, I started cutting up maps. The teacher asked me if I was going to paint, and I said "no". She could tell that I had great ideas and left me to discover the potential. I prefer collage because the pieces of paper contain information, which allows me to be as decorative as possible. I insist that the concept is of equal weight to the design aesthetic. Additionally, collage is the perfect medium for cubist perspectives, which is appealing.

If you could spend an hour with anyone you admire, living or dead, who would it be and what would you ask them?

I would invite Marcel Duchamp to dinner. I admire him for his conceptual approach to art, for dismantling the entire manner in which art can be made and understood. He is similar to Einstein in that he challenged us to rethink the connection between what we know, what we assume and what might be possible.

What do you need in your workspace to spark creativity?

I need ideas! And music, good lighting, a comfortable chair and lots of time and sustenance via delicious meals.

What would you like people to understand about your work?

Anachronistic is a word that fits much of my work. Digital technology allows me to manipulate and reproduce images to construct a collage made traditionally, constructed with cut paper and adhesive and to play with distortions between visual perspective and surface image. I exploit this combination of the ultra-modern and the old by placing images of new technological devices or practices in ancient or historic settings, a commentary about the state of “civilization”. Recurring motifs in my work include scientific discoveries, technology, alternative energy, location, and natural or unnatural disasters, though my output cannot be categorized in terms of specific subject matter; instead, it is my underlying approach and aesthetic that represent the unifying element. When I have an idea, I make many sketches to discover the best way to convey the idea and then search for images to incorporate into a collage. It always starts with an idea.

Has your identity, culture, heritage, or community influenced your creative practice?

My identity, culture, and heritage are only part of my creative practice. Some of my artwork draws on passages from Torah and the prophetic writings, the haftarot. Often, when listening to the Torah or a relevant discussion, I imagine what it would look like. Up to now, I have shared 30 collages on Sefaria exploring Torah texts through visual interpretation, treating these ancient words as a living source for contemporary art-making. I also make ketubot made of map collage, highlighting the couple's ancestral geography. My relationship to place has been just as formative. After graduating from art school, I moved to Israel, and the landscape there, unlike anything I'd known before, profoundly shaped my work. The topography itself became a subject: its light, its stone, its contours finding their way into my compositions. Living in Israel also means living through its history, and my art bears witness to that. I've made collages responding to the Lebanon War in the early 1980s, to the First Intifada, to the 2014 conflict with Gaza, and, more recently, to the war between Hamas and Israel that began on October 7th. These pieces are my way of processing conflict as it unfolds around me.

What does success look like to you as a creative?

Success for me is when my artwork sells at an exhibition. And when people appreciate it for the message it conveys. I would also define my success by whether applications for residencies, funding, or exhibitions are accepted.