From around 1999-2002 Paula Gottlieb created a series of paintings interpreted from old photos taken in the 1940’s and 1950’s on her family’s New Jersey poultry farm.  She transformed some of these black and white family photos into paint and color and in the process has recreated a period of time informed by memory and intuition.  The paintings are documentation and memoir of a thriving community that virtually disappeared by the 1970’s.  They honor the importance and uniqueness of this community and dispel the myth that Eastern European immigrant Jews were strictly urban while recognizing their contribution to early poultry farming in America.

This is what Paula says about this project:

In this series of oil paintings I bring to life the vanished culture of New Jersey’s Jewish chicken Farms of the 1940’s and 50’s.  I grew up on a farm with 10,000 free range chickens within a community of  Jewish people who left urban environments to make a living on the land . These farms have long disappeared, subsumed by large egg operations.

Informed by memory and intuition, I worked from black and white family photographs and created oil paintings in color, reviving the way of life of my childhood. The series consists of landscapes and portraits of my parents, grandmother, siblings, and myself. In addition to being beautiful, skillfully executed works of art, they evoke a feeling of a time long gone and a place in a different world and are therefore works of history, of culture.