Tag: design

  • UNOVIS School: Proto-Jewish futurism in Vitebsk, 1918

    UNOVIS School: Proto-Jewish futurism in Vitebsk, 1918

    Vitebsk, a small, mostly Jewish city in the old Pale of Settlement, is remembered in the art books as a birthplace of the Russian avant‑garde, but almost never as a place where Jews were actively prototyping their own futures (Vitebsk; “In the Beginning”). In the years 1918 to 1922, if you set Vitebsk next to the qualities that define Jewish Futurism in my own framework (tradition as engine, explicit future‑orientation, speculative design, tech–spirit entanglement, liberation, and collective imagination), it starts to look less like a side chapter of Russian modernism and more like an early Jewish futurist lab. What follows is that story, told through those lenses.

    Town of Vitebsk 1919 (Modern day Belarus)

    Jewish futurism as a lens

    In my own writing, Jewish Futurism is a creative framework that blends design, spirituality, and technology to reimagine the future of Jewish identity, ritual, and ethics. It treats Jewish sources and symbols as engines for new worlds, leans into speculation and prototyping, and loves that “ancient in the present” feeling, where neon‑lit interfaces sit next to kabbalistic cosmology and golem legends.

    If you strip that down to core moves, you get: start with Jewish values and stories, ask “what if” questions about the future, use speculative design and prototypes instead of just commentary, entangle tech and spirit, and keep liberation and repair as the moral north star. That is the checklist I am quietly running in the background as I look at Vitebsk.

    ​

    The political weather

    The Vitebsk experiment sits right in the storm of the Russian Civil War. The Bolsheviks had just seized power and dissolved the Constituent Assembly; Red, White, and nationalist forces were fighting across the old empire, and by 1918–1921 the war had wrecked the economy and militarized everyday life, especially in borderlands like Belarus and Ukraine (“Russian Civil War”). The new regime promised a rational, classless future, but enforced it with emergency repression and the Cheka, the Soviet secret police (“Russian Civil War”).

    Bolshevik Festival, 1918

    In culture, that meant art was not neutral. Festivals, agit‑prop posters, and street decorations became tools for staging the future socialist society in public space (“Russian Civil War”). In contemporary language, the state was demanding “design, not just description”: artists were expected to prototype the look and feel of a new world, not only paint it from the sidelines. Vitebsk’s People’s Art School and the UNOVIS collective were very much inside that program (“Chagall, Lissitzky, Malevich”; “UNOVIS”).

    Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge, El Lissitsky, 1919

    Jewish life between emancipation and trauma

    For Jews, the ground had just shifted. The revolutions abolished the Pale of Settlement and the old quota regime, so on paper Jews could live, study, and work without the old legal shackles (“Pale of Settlement”). Cities in the former Pale, including Vitebsk, suddenly opened up Jewish participation in schools, professions, soviets, and new cultural institutions (Vitebsk).

    Jewish Socialist Group, The Bund, election poster, 1917

    At the same time, the civil war unleashed catastrophic pogroms. In nearby Ukraine and parts of Belarus, White armies, nationalist militias, and irregular bands killed tens of thousands of Jews and displaced many more; refugees and bad news moved through the region constantly (“Pogroms during the Russian Civil War”). Early Soviet nationality policy recognized Jews as a “nationality” and created Jewish sections of the Party (Evsektsiia), pushing Jews into the socialist project while attacking synagogues, Hebrew, and traditional institutions, even as secular Yiddish culture and left‑wing Jewish politics boomed (Vitebsk).

    In other words, Jews in and around Vitebsk were newly emancipated on paper, traumatized and precarious in practice, and under pressure to imagine “what happens to Jewishness next”.

    Map of the Pale of Settlement highlighting Vitebsk. Image by author

    Vitebsk as a Jewish, experimental city

    Before the revolution, Vitebsk was a major Jewish center, with synagogues, heders, Yiddish markets, and a thick stew of Zionist, Bundist, and other Jewish politics (Vitebsk; “In the Beginning”). After 1917, Soviet institutions sat right on top of that fabric: workers’ councils, clubs, and schools tried to re‑engineer daily life (“In the Beginning”).

    In 1918, Marc Chagall came home from Petrograd and founded the People’s Art School, a free modern art school for local working‑class youth who had been locked out of Imperial academies, many of them Jewish (“Chagall, Lissitzky, Malevich”). He recruited avant‑garde teachers, turned Vitebsk into a small node in the international modernist network, and handed real tools and training to kids whose families had been under Tsarist restrictions only a few years earlier (“Chagall, Lissitzky, Malevich”). That is very close to what I mean today by a Jewish futurist “lab”: a place where a specific Jewish community uses design and education to build its own cultural future (Wirth).
    ​

    Vitebsk, village scene Marc Chagall, 1917

    Chagall’s speculative shtetl

    In those Vitebsk years, Chagall painted the works everyone now knows: flying couples and goats, skewed rooftops, synagogues hovering over town, a fiddler straddling chimneys. These are not just nostalgic postcards of the shtetl; they warp gravity and time. Past, present, and some maybe‑world bleed into each other.
    ​

    From a Jewish futurism angle, Chagall is doing exactly what I try to do with neon interfaces and AI‑inflected ritual objects. He is starting with Jewish stories and symbols and then using them as engines to invent new visual physics. The familiar becomes strange without losing its soul. That “ancient in the present” feeling that I care about so much is already there in his sky‑bound Vitebsk. His paintings read like prototypes of Jewish life under different rules, which is one of the key tests I use today for whether something is really operating as Jewish futurism.
    ​

    Over Vitebsk, Marc Chagall, 1913

    UNOVIS in the streets: the classic proto–Jewish futurist moment

    The moment that feels most like a straight‑up Jewish futurist intervention is when UNOVIS took the streets. Around 1919–1920, the collective of teachers and students around Malevich designed Suprematist banners, painted trams and building facades, and marched in revolutionary festivals with Black Squares and other abstract emblems.
    ​

    This is happening in a mostly Jewish city. The same streets that carried Jews to synagogue and market are suddenly wrapped in a new visual operating system. Instead of only Stars of David and Hebrew letters, there are squares, circles, and crosses floating over shopfronts and tram cars. The Black Square, which Malevich had already framed like a kind of icon, becomes a civic ritual sign on flags and sleeves.
    ​

    If I treat this like any other futurist project, it is textbook: a collective of young artists, many Jewish, redesigns the visual and ritual grammar of their own city, at scale, as a way of sketching a possible future world. It is design, not description. It is explicitly future‑oriented, embedded in a particular Jewish place, and it lives at the intersection of politics, symbol, and street‑level experience. Those are all the boxes I check in my Jewish Futurist design process today.
    ​

    Workshop of the Committee to Abolish Unemployment in Vitebsk with Suprematist panels by UNOVIS, 1919

    Lissitzky: from Had Gadya to pangeometry

    El Lissitzky is the other key bridge figure for me. Before and during his Vitebsk period, he designed Hebrew and Yiddish books, including a famous Had Gadya, where the Aramaic Passover song gets re‑composed with bold letters and geometric forms. Scholars like Igor Dukhan describe this as a move from “Jewish style” into a universal “pangeometry,” but they note that the universalism is built right on top of Jewish source material.
    ​

    In my terms, that is pure tradition‑as‑engine. He is not sprinkling Hebrew as flavor; the text itself is the design brief for a new visual system. In Vitebsk, Lissitzky then develops PROUN, a body of hybrid painting‑architecture pieces that look like floating structures in non‑Euclidean space, which he framed as “stations” between painting and architecture for a future society.
    ​

    That move—from a Passover song to speculative spatial diagrams for a different world—is the same arc I trace when I talk about going from Torah into high‑tech ritual objects. It is also a strong example of what I call entangling technology and spirituality: using the tools of print, geometry, and architectural thinking to work through spiritual questions about where and how a Jewish (and human) body might live in a new order.

    Chad Gadya – El Lissitsky
    Proun 19 D- El Lissitsky

    Malevich, UNOVIS, and secular ritual systems

    Malevich arrives in Vitebsk in 1919, invited by Lissitzky, and soon becomes the center of gravity at the People’s Art School. His experience with Cubo-Futurism ignites a shift in painting in the town. With him, teachers and students form UNOVIS, sign work collectively, and treat Suprematism as a total worldview. He talks about the Black Square as an “icon” and about non‑objectivity as a new metaphysics of pure feeling.
    ​

    In a Jewish environment, that lands differently than it would in a neutral setting. This is a town used to Torah scrolls, midrash, and messianic talk. UNOVIS is effectively rolling out a secular ritual system on top of that: new symbols, new processions, new “liturgies” of banners and posters that promise a transformed world. It is not Jewish ritual, but it is a speculative ritual layer in Jewish space, and Jewish students are the ones building it.
    ​

    Viewed with my framework, that is another type of tech–spirit entanglement: using visual technology and collective performance to test out a different metaphysics in the same streets where older Jewish ones still echo. It shows how close the Jewish Futurist line of questioning is to the avant‑garde’s own messianic streak, even when the language is strictly secular.

    The Faculty of the UNOVIS School. 1918

    Two Jewish futures in one school

    Inside the People’s Art School, there is a clear tension between two ways of thinking about the future. Chagall holds onto figures, stories, synagogues, and shtetl scenes, but floats them, tilts them, and sets them in saturated color. In my terms, he is modeling continuity through creative distortion: Jewish narrative and ritual feeling that survive and adapt without disappearing.

    Malevich, and the UNOVIS path, offer a different horizon: strip away all representation and identity markers and escape into pure geometric universals that are supposed to belong to everyone. Many students follow that road. Chagall finds himself sidelined and eventually leaves Vitebsk in 1920.
    ​

    From a Jewish Futurist vantage point, this is not only a stylistic argument. It is a fight over how you imagine a Jewish future under pressure. One path keeps tradition as engine and accepts that Jewishness will show in the work. The other tries to leap into something like a post‑Jewish universalism, betting that liberation means dissolving markers altogether. That same tension is alive now, whenever Jewish futurist work decides how visible to make its Jewish sources and audiences.
    ​

    Left- Lazar Khidekel, Suprematist Composition with Blue Square, 1921.
    Right- Marc Chagall, Anywhere out of the World, 1915–19. Oil on cardboard mounted on canvas. 

    Why no one called it “Jewish futurism”

    Curators and critics have done a lot of work on Vitebsk. The Jewish Museum show “Chagall, Lissitzky, Malevich: The Russian Avant‑Garde in Vitebsk, 1918–1922,” along with its catalogue, makes it clear the town was heavily Jewish and that Chagall and Lissitzky’s Jewish identities matter. Reviews in Studio International, the New York Times, Artmargins, Tablet, and Jewish Currents all talk about Vitebsk as a utopian laboratory.​

    What they do not do is connect that story to the language and methods that Jewish futurism uses now. The town is filed under “Russian avant‑garde,” while Jewish futurism is usually reserved for contemporary art, speculative fiction, and design work. The result is a blind spot: a historical moment that already behaves like a Jewish futurist lab is sitting in one file folder, and the present movement that could really use that precedent is sitting in another.
    ​

    Vitebsk as an early Jewish Futurist lab

    If I run Vitebsk through my own Jewish futurist checklist, it lights up. Tradition as engine: Chagall’s speculative shtetl and Lissitzky’s Had Gadya redraw Jewish stories and symbols into new visual systems. Explicit future‑orientation: a Jewish population just freed from the Pale and brutalized by pogroms is forced to imagine new futures in real time. Design, not just description: the People’s Art School, PROUN, and UNOVIS’s trams and banners are prototypes of new civic and spiritual grammars, not commentary about the old one.
    ​

    Tech and media entangled with spirituality: abstract signs, print, and architecture take on ritual roles in a Jewish city. Liberation and repair as north stars: even when the rhetoric is Marxist, the underlying drive is to get out from under Tsarist antisemitism and civil‑war terror and build something more just. Collective, situated imagination: a specific community, in a specific town, turns its own streets, schools, and bodies into a laboratory for what Jewish and human life might become next.
    ​

    Seen that way, Vitebsk is not an odd, provincial side note to Russian modernism. It is an early node in the same line of Jewish making that runs through my own neon‑lit spiritual objects, AI‑inflected Torah experiments, and design‑driven rituals today. Naming it as such is not just about correcting a footnote in art history. It is a way of claiming ancestors for Jewish futurism and remembering that this mode of thinking has been with us, in one form or another, since at least the moment a few Jewish kids in Vitebsk painted Suprematist banners for a world they had not yet learned how to live in.

    Core Works Cited

    “Chagall, Lissitzky, Malevich: The Russian Avant-Garde in Vitebsk, 1918–1922.” The Jewish Museum, www.thejewishmuseum.org/exhibitions/chagall-lissitzky-malevich-the-russian-avant-garde-in-vitebsk-1918-1922.[1]

    Dukhan, Igor. “El Lissitzky – Jewish as Universal: From Jewish Style to Pangeometry.” Monoskop, monoskop.org/images/6/6e/Dukhan_Igor_2007_El_Lissitzky_Jewish_as_Universal_From_Jewish_Style_to_Pangeometry.pdf.​

    “In the Beginning, There Was Vitebsk.” The Forward, 12 Mar. 2008, forward.com/culture/12913/in-the-beginning-there-was-vitebsk-01455/.​

    Jewish Virtual Library. “Vitebsk.” Jewish Virtual Library, www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/vitebsk.[4]

    “Russian Civil War.” Encyclopaedia Britannica, www.britannica.com/event/Russian-Civil-War.[5]

    “Pogroms during the Russian Civil War.” Wikipedia, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pogroms_during_the_Russian_Civil_War.​

    “Suprematism, Part II: El Lissitzky.” Smarthistory, 27 Sept. 2019, smarthistory.org/suprematism-part-ii-el-lissitzky/.​

    “UNOVIS.” Wikipedia, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNOVIS.​

    Wirth, Mike. “Jewish Futurism.” Charlotte Muralist, 9 Mar. 2022, mikewirthart.com/jewish-futurism/.​
    ​

  • Spiritual Creativity: My Journey into Community and Sacred Practice

    Spiritual Creativity: My Journey into Community and Sacred Practice

    What does it mean to make creativity a sacred practice, and how can art transform Jewish life? For me, becoming a Jewish artist wasn’t a career move. It was a spiritual awakening. This article traces how I came to see the creative process not only as a personal path to the divine but as a communal tool for connection, healing, and evolving Jewish tradition. Through murals, rituals, digital artwork, and collaborative design, I’ve learned that creativity can be one of the most powerful forms of Jewish practice we have today.

    “Why would you become a Jewish artist?” people used to ask me. “Isn’t that limiting your market to a very small sliver?” It’s true, I wasn’t always a Jewish artist. In fact, for a long time, I rarely made Jewish art. I was unsure. Afraid. Happy to be an assimilated American. Unaware of how essential it would become for me and for my community.

    I flirted with Jewish-themed projects years ago. Between 2008 and 2010, I worked with Hillel International and Manischewitz to create Jewish holiday infographic posters for social media. In 2014, I collaborated with the JDC (Joint Distribution Committee) to visualize their financial data and annual reports. I was illuminating the divine, even though I didn’t call it that yet.

    My Hanukkah infographic from the holiday set, 2010

    It wasn’t until 2015 that I truly made my first Jewish artwork: a portrait of Anne Frank for a mural exhibition called Renegades. Other artists were painting their own cultural heroes. Selecting figures who had gone against the grain. I realized it was time to seek my own. Anne Frank became my entry point into this work, a symbol to me of resilience and a powerful voice against erasure.

    Anne Frank by Mike Wirth- Painted in 2015 as part of the Renegades Exhibition- Statesville, NC

    That act of painting her opened a door. Slowly, I began to turn toward the sacred in my own tradition. The power of a large, colorful, public mural amplified the song I wanted to play during the process of making this artwork. My art-making became a form of prayer, my studio transformed into a sacred space, and my creativity evolved into an intentional spiritual practice.

    This shift happened when I read the Art of Jewish Prayer by Yitzhock Kirzner, Aryeh Kaplan’s Sefer Yetzirah: The Book of Creation, and My Name is Asher Lev by Chaim Potok, that I consciously directed my art towards sacred purposes, rooted in the Jewish tradition of Hiddur Mitzvah, the beautification of commandments. These texts provided context, examples, and permission to dive deep into creation with the Creator. Creating art that explicitly engaged Jewish symbols, rituals, and values was transformative. It connected my creative spirit directly to my Jewish heritage, deepening my understanding of who I was as both an artist and a Jew.

    Seeking Spirituality Beyond Home

    For years, spirituality felt elusive. I searched widely through books, traditions, and practices that were not native to me. They were meaningful, somewhat familiar, but not quite mine. The connection I sought remained just out of reach, inauthentic because it lacked resonance with my core identity.

    But art always felt different. Unlike anything else, the creative process opened a space where I felt fully present, deeply focused, and yet somehow expanded beyond myself. When I was in the flow of making, I experienced peace, clarity, and a sense of connection to something ineffable. Creativity became a spiritual threshold where my ego dissolved, time softened, and I encountered what I can only describe as spirit.

    Much like prayer or meditation, creativity required me to slow down, listen, and surrender. There was kavannah or intention and there was surrender to something unfolding through me, not just from me. The act of making was mirroring sacred ritual: there were preparations, gestures, rhythms, and moments of revelation. I realized I was building altars out of paper, light, pigment, and symbol.

    In those moments, my studio wasn’t just a workspace, but it was a mikdash me’at, a small sanctuary. Making became prayer. Not metaphorically, but truly: a way of communing with the Divine, of processing the world, and of seeking wholeness through acts of beauty and imagination.

    Turning Toward the Divine

    Everything shifted when I began to turn that creative intention toward the divine. Through Jewish themes, symbols, and rituals, I discovered a channel between my artistic life and my spiritual heritage. I wasn’t just illustrating ideas anymore, I was beginning to create images of the supernatural sensations I experienced in prayer and meditation. My imagination was filled with light, energy, movement, and meaning that felt deeply sacred and alive. I longed to capture the invisible. To make visible the ineffable sparks, flows, and forces that surged through ritual, study, and spiritual presence. I began to see the hidden energy encoded in the stories of the Torah. Figures like Moses, Miriam, and Elijah took on a new presence in my mind and not just as biblical characters, but as spiritual superheroes, carriers of divine power and transformation. Suddenly, creativity was no longer a separate mode of expression; it became my way of connecting, of serving, of sanctifying.

    Cosmic Shema- digital illustration by Mike Wirth, 2022

    Deepening Jewish Knowledge and Art

    That epiphany led to study. I immersed myself in Jewish art, theology, and spiritual traditions: Betzalel, Kabbalah, Hiddur Mitzvah, Mussar. I found ancient frameworks that affirmed what I had already intuited that art could be holy. That beauty was not frivolous. That creativity could be a form of moral and spiritual refinement.

    At a certain point, I realized I didn’t just want to explore this for myself and I wanted to help build a new creative-spiritual system that other Jews could use in practice. A framework that would invite both artists and non-artists to access spirituality through creative intention. A system rooted in Jewish values but expansive enough to meet people where they are in their community centers, schools, studios, or synagogues. A new pathway for sacred practice that could evolve alongside Jewish life itself.

    Design and the Sacred Creative Process

    As a designer and artist, I began to notice profound overlaps between the spiritual frameworks I was studying in Judaism and the design methodologies I used professionally. Both begin with empathy and intention. Both evolve through cycles. Both aim to make meaning. When I merged these systems, they each became more accessible, emotional, and impactful, not only for myself, but for others engaging with my work.

    This led me to develop a process I now use in both personal practice and community workshops. It blends design thinking, Jewish intentionality, and artistic exploration. I begin by identifying a question or tension. Something personal or communal. I respond with sketches, writing, or prototypes, then reflect on what resonates. I refine or rework the ideas in cycles, grounding the process in kavannah (spiritual intention) and humility. Over time, it becomes more than a finished piece, it becomes a tool for spiritual insight and connection. Here’s how it typically unfolds:

    A matrix of my creative-spiritual framework

    One of the most powerful connectors between these two worlds is iteration. In design, iteration means we test, revise, and revisit ideas. We are always improving through cycles of feedback. In Judaism, iteration is baked into everything: we revisit the same Torah portions each year with new eyes, we refine rituals through lived experience, and we continually return to core questions through study and prayer. This cyclical, reflective approach makes the sacred creative process feel alive. It becomes responsive to both tradition and change of the practice of ritual, liturgy, Torah cycles and compared them to the creative frameworks I used as a designer, I began to notice deep resonances. Jewish time is iterative. Rituals are prototypes refined over generations. Sacred texts are living documents engaged by communities in cycles. These are not just religious structures they are deeply creative systems.

    Merging the frameworks of UX design from sources like IDEO, Interaction Design Foundation and Jewish spiritual practice not only clarified both for me, but it made them more accessible, emotional, and human. Suddenly, design became prayerful. And Judaism became a beautifully designed user experience for living with meaning. In that synthesis, I found a personal theology of creativity, one that invites others in regardless of artistic background.

    How UX Design and Spiritual Practice overlap

    Witnessing Community Transformation 

    In 2023, I was part of the inaugural Social Practice Institute hosted by the Greensboro Jewish Museum. Over a 10-day intensive, my cohort of Jewish creatives explored the intersections of Social Practice theory and Judaism. As our capstone project, we were invited to create a social practice artwork grounded in Jewish values. I chose to design a ritual rooted in my family’s Shabbat practice by formalizing a simple yet powerful question that my non-Jewish partner asks each week: “What was your high and low?” Working with Rabbi Judy Schindler, I wrote a prayer and developed a ritual element that involved dipping salt and honey, symbolizing the sweet and bitter aspects of the week. This gesture transformed an informal tradition into a shared, sacred moment that felt authentically Jewish to our whole family.

    Infographic explaining my High and Low Shabbat ritual- Design by Mike Wirth, 2023

    At Queens University of Charlotte, I created a Hanukkah mural project that brought together a diverse and pluralistic group of students and community members. This included Jews from many backgrounds across the Charlotte community, including Orthodox, Reform, interfaith families, and cultural Jews working side-by-side. Each night, a community leader would light our real menorah and then spray paint the flame for that night on our mural menorah. It was a rare, joyous, and profound moment of connection, anchored in creativity and shared ritual.

    President Dan Lugo and his family at the final night of the Menorah-mural at Queens University of Charlotte, 2020

    In 2024, at Temple Shir Tikvah in Wayland, MA, I worked with the congregation during a 3-day residency to collect hundreds of photos, drawings, and stories of each member of the community’s “sacred Jewish objects.” We meditate on what it means for objects to be “Jewish” and “sacred”. Some gave Judaica while others gave images of a stuffed animal, because it reminded them of a recently deceased loved one. This exercise transformed these individual intimate artifacts into a collective community digital collage of a “time tapestry” of meaning that forged personal connections and bridged generations and practice. The final artwork became a visual record of personal memory and shared identity. We printed the 9 ’ x 9’ on archival fabric, and it currently hangs in the synagogue.

    The community time tapestry created with Temple Shir Tikvah, Wayland MA 2024

    In 2025, I will be participating in the Jewish Street Art Festival in collaboration with UC Irvine Hillel. That community has experienced deep pain. From campus protests disrupting life for Jewish students to student council boycott votes targeting Israel. Our art will be a form of public healing and spiritual resistance, a sacred reclamation of space through color, symbol, and story.

    Even online, I see how creativity becomes a sacred connector. When I post new Jewish-themed artwork for my upcoming Parshat guidebook, the response is immediate and profound. The comment threads and DMs often skip small talk entirely and dive straight into deep conversation about grief, joy, interpretation, and belonging. With just one image, we’re able to arrive at a spiritual place together. And that, to me, is sacred.

    Personal Revelation and Commitment

    What I’ve learned is simple and profound: creativity is not just for individual enlightenment. It is a communal force. It brings us into dialogue, into presence, and into the work of building something sacred together. My commitment is to continue creating in this way and not just to beautify our tradition, but to actively evolve it with care, joy, and intention.

    If this story resonates with you and if you’re looking to bring creative spiritual practice to your synagogue, school, museum, or campus, then I’d love to connect. I’m available for lectures, workshops, and collaborative art projects that help communities deepen their relationship with creativity, tradition, and each other.