“My work has a very strong mark of Judaism, but also a very strong mark of Argentinean identity.” Mirta Kupferminc to reporter, The Forward, 2009.
 
Mirta Kupferminc is an internationally recognized contemporary Argentine Jewish artist. For the past four decades, she has explored memory, culture, history, and language in a wide range of art media. Across her oeuvre, Kupferminc explores her Jewish and Argentine roots to deal with themes of universal relevance. She creates motifs that become part of her iconography, using them in different projects to explore multiple themes. 

Mirta Kupferminc was born in Buenos Aires, on March 16, 1955, to Aron Kupferminc and Agnes Mandl Mero, both survivors of Auschwitz. Her experience as the daughter of immigrants and Holocaust survivors became one of the pillars of her work: “One of the most important events in my life took place before I was born” (Sadow, 2015).
 
Mirta and her older sister Margarita grew up in a multilingual home. Aron was Polish and Agnes Hungarian; they spoke German together, and strongly accented Spanish with the girls. They wanted their daughters to integrate into Argentine society. 

At the ages of six and twelve, Mirta traveled with her family to visit survivor relatives in Hungary and Israel. They also visited Rome and Paris, exploring their main museums. Art and culture were highly valued in the Kupferminc home. Traveling at an early age and hearing multiple languages spoken at home gave her a different dimension of the world than many children received.
 
Wanting to study art, Kupferminc completed high school at the age of fifteen and was admitted to the Manuel Belgrano National Academy of Arts. She continued her studies at the National Academy of Fine Arts Prilidiano Pueyrredón and the National Academy of Higher Education in Fine Arts Ernesto de la Cárcova.

In her search to unite her Jewish and Argentine identities, Kupferminc addressed the relationship between the work of the Argentine writer J.L. Borges and the Kabbalah. The internationally renowned writer, who was not Jewish, used ancient rabbinical literature (A type of non-halakhic literary activitiy of the Rabbis for interpreting non-legal material according to special principles of interpretation (hermeneutical rules).midrash) and The esoteric and mystical teachings of JudaismKabbalah as sources for his literary work. In response to his mystical writings, Kupferminc produced a book for bibliophiles entitled Borges and the Kabbalah: Paths to the Word (2002) (Borges y la cabala: senderos del verbo), together with literature scholar Saul Sosnowski. They exhibited several times locally and internationally, and she created works in different media on the same theme.

The artist also explored recent Argentine history and memory through her work. On March 24, 1976, a military coup installed a civilian-military dictatorship in Argentina. During this time, the State carried out illegal repression, persecution, torture, and forced disappearance of people, as well as other forms of State terrorism. It is estimated that during this period the repressive forces made approximately 30,000 people disappear, until the restoration of democracy in 1983. On occasion of the 30th anniversary of the disappeared, Kupferminc created Thirtythousandandone (treintamiluno) (2005). 

The title of this work suggests the need for the artist to add “one” in order to individualize the commemoration of the estimated 30,000 victims. At the bottom of the work, there is a chair with wings. We can understand that the "disappeared," far from being buried, were "vanished into thin air," and the empty chair with wings allows us to remember them, through the lack of the sitter. At the top of the same work, we see an eye. The open eye represents the idea of the observer, of being a witness. The role of witness is also central to Jewish tradition. The witnessing eye is also used as a symbol of connection with the cosmos and the universe.

Kupferminc continued to explore different media and techniques. In The Skin of Memory (La piel de la memoria) (2007), exhibited at Centro Cultural Recoleta in Buenos Aires, she explored the relationship between ornamental tattoos and the numbered tattoo on her parents’ arms as Auschwitz survivors through a video installation and performance.  

In 2009 Kupferminc had a major retrospective show in New York. Around this time, she also introduced embroidery into her work, by applying the traditional Hungarian needle craft to photographs of hands, actually embroidering the printed pictures. She addressed memory and migration and used the hand as a symbol of the path of life. This was not a new concept for Kupferminc, as she had begun in 1998 to work with hands in etchings surrounded by wandering characters, exhibited at the Taiwan Biennial. For Kupferminc the natural lines in the palm of her hand represent a journey of life, like a map, the artist’s own hand representing the territories of her life, where the Hungarian aesthetic embroidery and the tattooed prisoners numbers on her parents’ arms meet through the needle.

For the project Hand Written (Escrito a mano, 2009), Kupferminc photographed the hands of famous Jewish writers and produced a new body of work: paintings and etchings of each writer’s palm, overlaid by their texts. She worked with Israeli and Argentine writers Amos Oz, A. B. Joshua, Meir Shalev, Saul Sosnowski, Manuela Fingueret, and Eliahu Toker, as well as her own hand with a text by Borges.

In 2012 Kupferminc received the National Prize, the highest artistic distinction in Argentina. The following year she was the first international art fellow at LABA, A Laboratory of Jewish Culture, in New York, where she created a series of works related to feminism and motherhood entitled EVE: Chair of all mothers (Eva: la madre primordial), S-Naked (Transformado en serpiente), and Divine Desire (Divino deseo). In 2015, she launched LABA Buenos Aires, allowing exchange between artists working on similar themes at different locations around the world.

In 2017 Kupferminc represented Argentina in the Jerusalem Biennial with her installation Traduttore-Tradittore (Translator-Traitor), in which she addressed the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel as the birth of otherness. The piece included hand-cut rubber letters of different alphabets and the story of the Tower of Babel in 70 languages. In 2019, Kupferminc curated the group exhibition “Confrontation/Conversation” by eighteen Argentine Jewish and non-Jewish artists who exhibited at the Jerusalem Biennial. 
 
In 2018 Marianne Hirsch invited Kupferminc to join the international working group Women Mobilizing Memory, in which Kupfemrinc explores the relationship between memory and being a woman artist. Together with Hirsch and Spitzer, she developed the series Bearing Witness (2019), in which she addresses photography as a means of resistance and pays tribute to Mendel Grossman, a clandestine photographer from the Lodz Ghetto.

Mirta Kupferminc lives in Buenos Aires with her husband Kurt Frieder. She creates and teaches art in her workshop, mentors artists through the project Grafica Insurgente, and leads the LABA-BA study group together with Tova Shvartzman. She continues to exhibit nationally and internationally, participates in international conferences, and lectures about her work.

Memory (1989); Homage in memory of the victims of AMIA (1996); On the Way (2001); Borges and the Kabbalah: Paths of the Word (2006); Treintamiluno (2005); Four Entered Paradise (2006); The Skin of Memory (2007); Embroidered onto the Skin of Memory (2009); En la Palma de mi mano (2011); Hand Written (2012); EVE: Chair of all mothers (2014); S-Naked (2015); Divine Desire (2014); Traduttore-Tradittore (2017); Bearing Witness – Tribute to Mendel Grossman (testimony for the witness) (2019).

The only female member of the founding group of photorealists, American painter and sculptor Audrey Flack is widely recognized for the feminine content in her art. Her feminist sensibilities manifest in both her pioneering paintings, which often consider stereotypes of womanhood, and her sculptures, frequently depicting goddesses and other strong female figures.

Born in New York to Jeanette and Morris Flack, Eastern European immigrants from Galicia, Audrey Flack was five years younger than her brother Milton. Her Jewish identity was nurtured by her middle-class parents who, although not orthodox in their religiosity, lit candles for the Sabbath and observed Passover and the High Holy Days.

As a child, Flack knew that she wanted to be an artist; among her early work is a watercolor of rabbis in a synagogue, painted when she was around fourteen years old. She studied at the High School of Music and Art and Cooper Union (1948–1951), later receiving her B.F.A. from Yale University (1952), where she trained with modernist Josef Albers. Through the early 1950s Flack painted canvases in a gestural style influenced by Abstract Expressionism, as exhibited at a solo exhibition at the Roko Gallery (1959) in New York. Unsatisfied, Flack resolved to paint in a representational fashion even though at the time many viewed the mode as passé. Additional studies at the Art Students League confirmed her desire to paint representationally. When Flack returned to figuration she took yet another chance by choosing to explore her own identity through self–portraits and portraits of her young daughters, Melissa (b. 1959) and Hannah (b. 1961). Her musician husband was uninvolved with the children and at times threatening, but Flack believed that she could do it all: caring for her daughters would not stop her from having a successful artistic career. Flack’s ambitions were further compounded by Melissa’s severe autism; while highly intelligent, Melissa is mute and to this day still requires around-the-clock supervision. By 1968, Flack was divorced and two years later she married her high school sweetheart, Bob Marcus, who adopted both girls.

During the 1960s Flack began to utilize photographs as the inspiration for her imagery. Initially she favored black-and-white news photographs as source material, featuring public figures such as John D. Rockefeller (1963) and even Adolf Hitler (1963–64) in subdued colors. A canvas portraying President Kennedy (1964) in his motorcade moments before his assassination was her first painting in this vein from a media–generated color photograph.

In the early 1970s, negotiating single motherhood while pursuing her art, Flack started the large–scale canvases for which she is best recognized. Based on configurations of objects arranged by Flack in her studio and then photographed, Jolie Madame (1972), her first monumental photorealist still-life, was executed with both underpainting and airbrush from a slide projected on a wall. Now part of the permanent collection of the National Gallery of Australia, Jolie Madame embraces and celebrates traditional objects associated with femininity and feminine beauty, including glistening jewelry and the perfume bottle that lends the painting its title. Soon after its completion, the detailed canvas appeared in “Women Choose Women” at the New York Cultural Center, the first large-scale exhibition organized by women and solely showing art by women. The Museum of Modern Art purchased Leonardo’s Lady (1974), from Flack’s Grey Border series, within a year of its completion; it was the first photorealist painting the museum acquired.

Vanitas series

Comprised of three paintings all eight feet square, Flack’s early Vanitas series (1976–78) drew inspiration from Baroque still-life allegories that comment on the transience of life. Painted with lush, intense colors and a high gloss surface, Marilyn (Vanitas) (1977), the best known of the series, explores stereotypes of womanhood. Amid matter of decided feminine content, such as the perfume bottles, makeup, and jewelry that defined her subject, Flack depicts a young, as-yet-uncorrupted Norma Jean in a black-and-white photograph before she became the brittle, blond Marilyn Monroe of Hollywood. Flack aimed to comment on the sex symbol’s ephemerality by presenting these objects and the woman along with a burning candle, a shifting hourglass, and a shriveling orange. At the same time, the flawless painting also evokes the artist’s own vulnerability, as Flack includes a self-portrait based on a photograph of herself as a young girl. This painting and so many others demonstrate how Flack’s concerns differed from her male counterparts, something that was noticed, sometimes unfavorably, by the press. Flack did not want to coolly paint neutral content derived from photographs, typical of her male peers, and instead proudly produced illusionistic canvases plumbing personal, socio–political, and feminist issues replete with complex symbolic iconography.

Another excellent example of Flack’s highly individual approach is the lesser-known and exceptionally powerful and personal first Vanitas painting, World War II (Vanitas) (1976–77). Also anchored by a magnified, sharply delineated trompe l'oeil (trick of the eye) colorstill–life and black-and-white photograph, this canvas combines pretty objects with a reproduction of Life photographer Margaret Bourke-White’s iconic, devastating picture of the liberation of Buchenwald (1945). Rendered in black-and-white, the exhausted and stunned prisoners behind the barbed wire fence contrast with the rich, glowing colors of the pastries sitting on a heavily polished silver platter. Among the array of other objects in front of Bourke-White’s duplicated photograph are a red candle dripping like blood, a rose,and a Star of David from Flack’s keychain. Some of these objects sit on a book open to a quote about faith from the Hasidic leader Nahman of Bratslav (1772–1810). Flack explained why she amalgamated such diverse elements: “My idea was to tell a story, an allegory of war…of life….the ultimate breakdown of humanity…the Nazis…to create a work of violent contrasts, of good and evil. Could there be a more violent contrast than that?” (exact transcription from original; Audrey Flack on Painting, 78).

In the early 1980s, believing that she had exhausted the possibilities of photorealism, Flack started making large indoor and outdoor bronze sculptures, some on commission, of female goddesses such as Diana, Medusa, and Athena, as well as invented deities. Sculpted after posed models in her studio, Flack offers these women as strong heroines rather than as objectified figures. Egyptian Rocket Goddess (1990), a semi-nude bronze with a taught body, stands forty-two inches high on her base. Striding forward, the goddess’s arms are wrapped by snakes meant to recall ancient Minoan snake goddesses whose reptiles symbolized fertility. Coalescing the modern with the ancient, a rocket appears on the drapery around the goddess’s waist and on her headdress.

Flack received several major public commissions resulting in public sculpture. Civitas (1991), a monumental gateway to the city of Rock Hill, South Carolina, consists of four 20-foot tall bronze statues of women holding symbols of the city. A fourteen-foot tall bronze Recording Angel,sculpted for the Schermerhorn Symphony Center in Nashville (2006), portrays a classically dressed angel who holds a feathered quill in her left hand and a compact disc in her right hand, as if inscribing musical notes.

Along with World War II (Vanitas),Flack has made a number of other works related to her religio-cultural heritage. When Flack returned to figuration she painted Matzah Meal Still Life (c. 1960), which shows the ingredients needed to make foods typically eaten on Jewish holidays. Carefully arranged on the delightful, Pop–influenced canvas are products by Manischewitz, the best-known kosher food provider, in addition to other kosher ingredients found in a Jewish home. She produced a portrait of Anwar Sadat for the cover of Time magazine’s January 2, 1978, issue on the leader as “man of the year.” Her composition presents Sadat in three-quarter’s view against a brightly colored background. The background incorporated subtle symbolism: The blue and white sky represents Israel and the Israeli flag with the colors below indicating the Egyptian flag.

Flack has also tackled biblical subjects, from both the Hebrew and the Christian Bible, in watercolor, oil, and sculpture. For six years Flack worked on a 36-inch tall statue of Eve (2006–12), who holds interest for the artist because of her role as the first mother but also because, as Flack put it: “I’m trying to restore Eve’s image like I’m trying to restore women’s image. My Eve is sexual and beautiful. I want Eve to be accepted as intelligent. She can have a baby and she can pick from the Tree of Knowledge and still stand tall. She wants answers. That’s a good thing” (Flack, interview with the author, New York, June 18, 2010).

Around 2005, Flack began attending banjo camp and has since become an accomplished banjo player. She quickly learned to frail and claw hammer and subsequently formed a band, appropriately named “Audrey Flack and the History of Art Band.” The band’s repertoire comprises songs written by Flack about art-related subjects and a wide range of artists, among them Mary Cassatt, Jackson Pollock, and Lee Krasner, set to old-time bluegrass melodies. A CD was released in 2013.

Flack recently and ardently turned to drawing. She is exploring two of her enduring interests: women and religion. Drawing has also led her back to painting, this time with a brush to canvas rather than using an airbrush.

From 1992–93, a major retrospective of Flack’s art, organized by the J.B. Speed Art Museum in Louisville, Kentucky, traveled to four museums around the country, including the National Museum of Women in the Arts. Among many awards and honors, Flack holds an honorary doctorate from Clarke University and received the Augustus Saint-Gaudens Medal from Cooper Union. She has written three books, Audrey Flack on Painting (1986), Audrey Flack: The Daily Muse (1989), and Art and Soul: Notes on Creating (1991). Flack is the first living female artist to appear in H.W. Janson’s revised textbook—the standard in the field for decades. In 2017, Flack received a lifetime achievement award from the Women’s Caucus for Art. An award-winning 75-minute documentary film about her art and life, Audrey Flack: Queen of Hearts, was released in 2019.Flack’s art is held by prominent museums across the world.

Selected Writing by Audrey Flack

Flack, Audrey. Audrey Flack on Painting. Introduction by Lawrence Alloway.New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., Publishers, 1981.

Flack, Audrey. Art and Soul: Notes on Creating. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1986.

Flack, Audrey. Audrey Flack: The Daily Muse. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., Publishers, 1989.

Multi-disciplinary artist, curator, and art consultant Vered Nissim was born in the city of Holon, Israel, on August 4, 1980. She was brought up in a working-class family of newcomers who arrived in Israel in 1954 from Baghdad, Iraq. Her family included her father, Benjamin, her mother Esther (Suada), and her siblings Liat, Lior, and Ronen, who passed away young. She has been especially influenced by her mother, a cleaning and maintenance person by profession, and has even included her mother in most of her art projects.

Nissim earned a B.F.A from the Midrasha School of the Arts, Beit Berl College (2006) and an M.F.A from the arts department, Haifa University (2017).

Nissim self-identifies as a Mizrahi feminist, and her art revolves around her gender, ethnic, and class identities. She holds a political Lit. "Eastern." Jew from Arab or Muslim country.Mizrahi worldview, aiming to give voice to marginalized women in Israeli society. She seeks to provide an alternative to the rigid canon determined by the mainstream art field by presenting works that undermine Israeli-Western aesthetic values and content. One of the ways in which she does this is by utilizing materials and art forms that the hegemonic art world regards as “improper”—folkloristic and decorative art customarily deemed unworthy of inclusion in the discourse of visual culture.

One such piece is an installation (Untitled, 2014) set on the floor, whose composition consists of dozens of simple, cheap, yellow rubber cleaning gloves arranged in the shape of a circular shining sun.

The artist explains that the sun—a symbol of bright light—here ironically creates questions regarding color and shades of darkness. Nissim’s dark-skinned Iraqi heritage seems to be pleading with the sun, as if whitening her dark looks in order to whitewash her black skin clean, its warm beams casting out all the shadows of her Mizrahiness. The use of yellow gloves to symbolize the sun evokes a matrix of associations. One such associations is the stereotype of the “hot-as-sun” Mizrahi woman—an inhabitant of the Orient, which, as Edward Said asserts, still suggests not only fecundity but also sexual promise (and threat), untiring sensuality, and unlimited desire. Another is that of the sunflower, whose seeds are, in the dominant public imagination, consumed by oriental women lounging on sun-flooded Middle Eastern balconies—an image sharply contrasting with Van Gogh’s Western, civilized iconic sunflower. Likewise, it evokes, states Nissim, the stereotypes of kitsch and bad taste, Mizrahi woman regularly being called freha or slutty. Nissim thus employs a style, content, and medium that subverts the good taste of high art, disrupting the proper social order.

In this piece, Nissim also uses a strategy of humor as subversion. The work addresses repressed histories and the fragile nature of contemporary assumptions about marginalized subjects, such as Mizrahi women. The cheap yellow gloves evoke the stereotype of the under-educated Mizrahi woman who stays at home to cook, clean, and take care of her large brood rather than the standard, Western 2.4 children that enable women to earn a higher education and develop a career outside the home. Because they are of lower socio-economic status, Mizrahi women in Israel are frequently associated with cleaning and maintenance jobs, not only in offices and factories but also for rich Ashkenazi families. Nissim confronts the viewers with the ever-growing gap between ethnic groups as Mizrahi women choose or are compelled to work in low-paid, low-status jobs. She also accentuates the limited opportunities open to Mizrahi women for higher education and their confinement to the periphery—whether geographic, economic, or cultural. Women living in peripheral areas generally do not receive sufficient and high-quality education; often their social mobility is restricted, perpetuating their low-income status. Finally, the artist states that the plain, cheap yellow gloves bear a very personal meaning for her, as they are an integral part of the daily equipment of her mother, who works as a cleaning woman.

The use of the yellow rubber cleaning gloves (made to protect laboring hands from toxic cleaning products and overuse) to symbolize the sun also raises the question of the tension between function and aesthetics. Nissim prompts the viewer to consider whether Mizrahi women can ever be totally clean(s)ed of their blackness—or whether they are forever doomed to suffer the consequences of the dominant society’s power relations and remain economically and culturally suppressed. Calling attention to multiple ongoing power relationships—between Mizrahis and Ashkenazis, blacks and whites, impoverished and affluent, men and women, Nissim lays bare the complex, multilayered, intersectional positions of various members of Israeli society. The contrast between domestic (feminine) cleaning and the creation of high art in the (masculine) public space of the museum places identity construction—including racialization and gendering— at center stage.

Nissim’s 2005 self-portrait photograph “Half Free” allows her to embark on a multi-layered discussion of gender, race, and class dimensions. The title refers to an Israeli supermarket chain that offers low-priced basic food items in outlets on the outskirts of big cities. Targeting low-income families, it is famous for its cheap plastic shopping bags.

In this image, the bag with its writing, Half Free, covers Nissim’s face, leaving her choking for air. Both shocking and grotesque, the image exemplifies how humor can subvert fossilized cultural values. A unique type of weapon, humor takes freedoms with conventional moral, social, and economic values.

Placing the issue of class at the center of this work, Nissim states that it gives visibility to people who are invisible—namely, blue-collar workers. This piece not only refers to the socio-economically lower class but also reflects the traditional gender division of labor, as women are expected to be in charge of shopping for groceries and cooking for the entire family. The woman in this photograph, with her dark skin and bright red lipstick—an allusion to the “sluttiness” traditionally attributed to Mizrahi women—signals the threefold oppression from which Mizrahi women suffer: class, gender, and ethnicity. In so doing, Nissim seeks to undermine stereotypical attitudes and to highlight the political intersections of various categories of identity categories.

In a 2006 photo titled “Civic Guard,” Nissim again chose to present herself, this time dressed in a uniform of a contracting company providing security services to major shopping centers, her dark-skinned face fitting the exploitative occupational profile of Mizrahi women in contemporary Israel.

This choice draws subversive attention to the status of Mizrahi women in Israeli society, many condemned to work in temporary, exploitative jobs to ensure the safety of the general population while having no financial security of their own. Nissim takes an ironic and humorous approach: in the contemporary era of surveillance and security cameras, secret undercover government activities, and unstable security around the globe and in the Middle East in particular, a woman with no proper training is put in charge of the safety of hundreds of thousands of people visiting shopping malls. Not only are security checkpoints common in Israel, but profiling forms one of the central tools for foiling potential threats. Here, the Mizrahi worker is employed to prevent the danger she herself is often seen as constituting: the Arab/Other/enemy. In charge of securing the area, she symbolizes the dominant order as it prevents women such as herself from penetrating the public sphere and taking equal part in the civic, cultural, and economic life of the country. Nissim also emphasizes the doubly oppressed position of the woman in the image: in contrast to the prestigious security jobs (for men fighting in the IDF and protecting the home front with real weapons), she is left with the much less prestigious, un-skilled, civilian job of checking bags at the entrance to a shopping mall.

“Civic Guard” also represents the marginality from which Mizrahi women suffer under Israeli neo-liberalism, drawing attention to the fact that security guards employed by contracting firms are exploited financially and have no job security. Workers in unskilled jobs—cashiers, cleaners, care-givers, security guards—are extremely vulnerable to abuse. Contracting firms in Israel in particular exploit the system and trend towards privatization in order to gain greater a share of the non-professional market sector at the expense of those least able to stand up for their rights, including working conditions, over-time wages, sexual harassment, social and employment security, and more.

“Civil Guard” also reveals the ethnicization and gender processes prevalent in Israel—Ashkenazim work in high-salary, high-status, high-tech jobs, Mizrahim in low-paid, low-status, “low-tech” jobs, and 70% of minimum wage jobs in Israel are filled by women. The majority of women in Israel who work in low-paid jobs are resigned to being exploited, frequently not even expecting to gain a fair recompense for their labor.

Feminist Mizrahi women artists such as Nissim thus use their artwork to articulate the obstacles they face in their daily lives. Such obstacles include inequalities and oppression in the employment market, racial profiling, sexual exploitation, and the degrading attitude toward Mizrahi culture in general and feminine Mizrahi culture in particular. These artistic representations draw attention to and help to undermine patriarchal-Ashkenazi-neoliberal hegemony.

Nissim not only reveals the oppressive facets of being a Mizrahi woman but also accentuates and celebrates her Mizrahiness, creating positive and powerful representations of Mizrahi women. In Untitled, a photograph from 2011 (Figure 4), the woman—Nissim herself—sits naked on her kitchen counter, her body covered in cooking oil and Kuba dumplings, a traditional Iraqi food.

While this scene may be understood as Nissim’s homage to her mother—an important figure in the artist’s life who dedicated herself to taking care of her family and cooking their favorite foods—it also reveals a fiercely critical stance against ethnic and gendered stereotypes. Often, the kitchen is presented as the only Mizrahi cultural arena, as if eating is the only activity in Mizrahi culture. Nissim explained that this piece was meant to subvert the derogatory representation of the Mizrahi woman chained to her kitchen and replace it with a young, beautiful, assertive woman who chooses to continue the matrilineal Mizrahi tradition, from a new stance, proud of who she is.

Mizrahi artists such as Nissim create a self-reflexive gaze as part of their effort to construct a valid, sovereign identity. They hope to liberate their stereotypical image from being perpetuated as the Other in terms of ethnicity, and instead call to celebrate Mizrahi culture, and Mizrahi women especially.

Nissim has won eight prizes, among them the Oded Messer Prize for a Young Artist (2008); the Pais Prize for Artists (2008); the Joshua Rabinovich Prize (2011); the Young Artist Prize of the Israeli Ministry of Culture (2015); and the Becki Dekel Prize for Leading Feminist Israeli Artist (2020). She has had six solo exhibitions and taken part in over 30 group exhibitions.