In The Beginning Photograph

Joyce Steinfeld is best known for her sculpture and artwork, that empowers people to connect with their best self and live an aspiring and inspirational life, with healing love and happiness.   I was born and raised in New York City. I can remember knowing in the first grade that I would be an artist. Art was my passion and I excelled in it in a way that I did not in my other school work. I attended the High School of Music and Art. It was a great honor to go to this school and I traveled on a  bus and train for 3 hours round trip each day to attend school. I have a Bachelor of Fine Arts. College is what brought me to live in California.   My mature work started when I realized I could combine my spiritual interests with my artistic creations, and I started to understand the magic and power of the shapes that I made. Humans communicate in many ways, and my shape creations became a language of its own to me. I started to use words in my art and sculpture. An early project was to design a style for the Hebrew Alphabet. I taught myself the alphabet by looking at different versions of a letter, and then designing my own letter style. I also learned the spiritual meanings connected with each letter as taught in the Kabbalah tradition.  I combined letters to make word sculptures and I expanded to different languages such as Arabic, Chinese, and Sikh. I called this work “Language Art”.  I met native speakers of these languages who helped me, to make sure the artwork would be recognized for the word that it represented. Working together with these people, relationships and friendships developed. I began to feel that we are all one, but just wearing different coats that make us seem different to each other.
 Words are powerful, in the Bible, it says: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God". Everything that is created is first a word. When I abstract the human form I want to express our oneness so I show gender but not race, nationality and ethnicity.  
I have public art in the United States and Israel. I had an exhibit in Israel, that I called " The Garden of Hebrew and Arabic Letters". I created a digital book with the sculptures and a poem and translated the book from English to Hebrew and Arabic. I worked with people who helped me with the translations and I was amazed to learn that my poem could not be translated, word for word, but was changed and paraphrased by the translation.