Don Brewer transcribes the artists talks from the opening of ‘The Path and the Strucure’ at the Center for Emerging Visual Artists. At the opening, Leslie Friedman said of her work and the way she began thinking of some of her recent installations, Jewish identity, and stereotypes in general:

I started to think, ‘What would cool Jewish art look like?’ ‘What would it look like if Jewish art were being sold?’ And that’s been an under-current of a lot of my work. I showed my work at Napoleon in a show called ‘Gay, Jewish or Both?’ But, something that I keep going back to is this question of identity. I hope that in my work you see that I’m talking about Jewish stereotypes. The most negative stereotypes are represented at the bottom, the middle ones are a little more ambiguous, and potentially more positive ones at the top. But, I hope that even though I’m choosing to talk about Jewish identity that you can see how it can apply to any cultural identity. Anything that makes you the ‘other’.