VARDA YORAN

She was born and raised in China to Jewish parents who emigrated from Russia and spent the first twenty years of her life there. She was educated in English at the Jewish School in Tientsin during the Japanese occupation of China and throughout World War II. Her entire life has been an exposure to a conglomerate of cultures – Chinese, Russian, English, Jewish, and Japanese. Her art is influenced and traversed by all these cultures.

A year after the State of Israel was established, Varda settled there with her twin sister. Twenty-seven years later, her husband’s career took them and their two daughters to London and eventually to the United States, where they currently live and work as Brooklyn Based Sculpture Artists.

She has worked in several fields throughout her professional career. For instance, she taught English at the Tientsin Jewish School and Hebrew in a new immigrants’ camp in Israel. She was on the staff of the English newspaper The Jerusalem Post. She did her mandatory community service in the Israeli Air Force, where she served for two years. She did social work both in an official capacity and as a volunteer. She was a graphic artist at one of the top commercial art studios in Israel, and then freelanced in commercial art. She was an art therapy intern at the psychiatric ward of a hospital in Long Island. She raised two daughters. She translated her husband’s memoirs of his WWII experiences from Polish into English, which was later published under the title, The Defiant.

Varda started drawing at a young age. As a new immigrant in Israel, she studied at the Bezallel School of Art. She later attended some adult education courses in Israel, London, and the United States. In New York she studied at the Art Students League and took seminars in Art Therapy at the New School for Social Research. In 1979, she started formally studying sculpture with Aline Geist in Long Island, and her art practice gradually transitioned from painting towards sculpture.

She likes to work with different media, ranging from stone to wood, clay, wax, and even Lucite; she employs various techniques and methods. Varda perceives art as a coonversation between the audience and artist, she strives to project her thoughts and feelings in a way that is understandable and relatable. She feels that her sculptures speak for her.

Varda’s work as an artist has been featured in numerous group exhibitions. She also had individual exhibitions in the United States and Israel. In 1996, she was honored with the Eleanor Roosevelt Award, presented by the American Jewish Congress Commission for Women’s Equality. She has been interviewed by several media outlets, including Shirley Romaine’s TV segment titled, “Artschene on Long Island”, and Florence Rapoport’s “Focus on Women”. Varda was also awarded with an Honorary Fellowship by Tel-Aviv University.

Varda has a long-standing relationship with Tel-Aviv University. One of her sculptures, titled, Tai Chi, rests on the university campus. The piece explores the artist’s childhood memories through an 11-foot slab of granite. There’s also, The Continuous Connection, a sculpture which is presented exclusively to members of the President’s Council of the University. Holocaust and Revival, a six-foot tall bronze created as a tribute to the survivors, was inaugurated in May 2004.

Varda’s husband was born in Poland and lived through the Holocaust. Hence, anything related to the Holocaust resonates very deeply within her family. Agony, a 5-foot-long bronze figure lying on a pile of railroad ties, is part of the permanent exhibition at the Museum of Ghetto Fighters in Israel. Having a sculpture in this particular museum is especially meaningful and significant to Varda.

An abstract interpretation of Family, commissioned by The Rabin Medical Center in Israel, is permanently exhibited on the hospital’s grounds

Valor in Flight, made of strips of aluminum, represents the motion of aircrafts taking off for combat, for rescue missions, for venturing into outer space, and for daring military operations. This piece is part of the permanent exhibition at the Israel Air Force Center in Israel.