Features/Reviews

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Playwright, author and visual artist Tom Block began writing plays a few years ago. His work immediately attracted the attention of Wanderlust Theater Lab’s founder Roselie Vasquez-Yetter. She led Tom’s first play, White Noise through a series of readings and then to production last June.

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White Noise, performed by Wanderlust Theatre at the Fridge this weekend, is a play that’s impossible to separate from the exhibit of paintings by DC artist Tom Block. So I’ll begin by describing the paintings themselves.

Okay ….

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While artists do not change the world by merely raising awareness of a social issue, their activist art can mobilize people and resources around a cause. Tom Block, a witty and eloquent artist and writer based in Silver Spring, Maryland, revealed this philosophy to a mixed-faith crowd at the Mishin Fine Arts Gallery in San Francisco from May 4 to May

As the old saying goes, a picture can be worth a thousand words. But a local gallery has united two separate artists stemming from Jewish and Islamic backgrounds to convey only one: peace.

Do you have a formal art education or are you a self taught artist:

In a world where so many writers of nonfiction illustrate facts and figures in black and white, Thomas Block illuminates the history of Jewish and Muslim mysticism in a vividly hued portrait.  Shalom/Salaam: A Story of Mystical Fraternity is a well-researched and carefully drawn masterpiece.  In this culmination of more than ten years of sustained interest and thorough resear

If you believe the narratives of modern Zionists and Islamophobes, Jews and Muslims exist in a natural state of animosity. The relationship between the people of the two faiths is, according to this story, typified by massacres, oppression and antagonism, and the current situation in Palestine is just one episode in a long history of conflicts.

Want something truly provocative to discuss at Passover next week? Or, if you’re among the 2 billion Christians approaching Holy Week and thinking about the history of Jerusalem: Want to revolutionize your understanding of what has unfolded across the Holy Land between Jews and Muslims?

What an interesting choice of subject. Although Thomas Block is not the first to claim that Sufism, a mystical tradition within Islam, has been a formative influence on the development of Jewish mysticism from the