Two entrepreneurial women make a dream happen

An age-old question: How do you define art? 

In the hands of Jude Amsel it’s so much more than most would imagine because she sees art everywhere and in every way. 

You need only step inside her MAJU gallery on Bridge Street to realize the sculptures and paintings that are everywhere don’t begin to tell the story of how this accomplished artist sees art everywhere she looks. It is in the jewelry on shelves and tables, the toys in the children’s area. 

“I wanted to be engaging to everyone,” she said about the eclectic array of items one would not find in many galleries. Although still in its infancy, the gallery, she says, is what was in her mind, heart and soul when she was just a child growing up in Milwaukee.

A first-generation American, she was born to parents who escaped Nazi Germany and free thinking was always encouraged in her home. 

“For me, art has never simply been a career. It has been a constant thread throughout my life,” Ms. Amsel said. 

She is a ceramic artist and printmaker whose work has been featured in galleries, museums and private collections. While continuing her own work, she has also focused on teaching others to find their inner artist. For 25 years, she taught others, curated and represented other artists. “I’m about education,” Ms. Amsel said. “Arts education and making the arts accessible to others has always been important to me,” she said.

Through outreach programs, she has brought the arts to communities and families who might not otherwise have had access to them, she added.

After the horror of 9/11, she was chosen by the City of New York to design a ceramic sculpture memorializing the 343 firefighters who perished in their effort to save others from the World Trade Center buildings. “It remains one of the greatest honors of my career,” Ms. Amsel said. 

With the approaching 25th anniversary of that terrible day, she often finds herself thinking a about those who sacrificed their lives to save others.

“Ceramics, in particular, has always been my passion and over the years, I developed my own special technique of printing on clay, a process I used in creating the firefighter sculpture for the New York Fire Museum,” Ms. Amsel said. 

She came to the East Coast on a visit, fell in love with the area and never looked back, she said, living in Queens, but she’s been an Islander for many years now. She has operated galleries from New York to Florida and continues to split her time between both places. 

On the Island she first taught from her home studio, then gained space in the barn at the Shelter Island History Museum. But as activities picked up there, she began scouting other venues. When the former Jack’s Marine stood empty it saddened her and the feeling was shared by her friend of 15 years, Marie Eiffel.

“Jack’s had been such an important part of Shelter Island, and neither of us wanted to see another empty storefront,” Ms. Amsel said. “When the opportunity came along, Marie and I decided to collaborate and breathe new life into the space.” 

Ms. Eiffel negotiated an agreement to turn the space into a gallery. “She’s got moxie,” Ms. Amsel said. Initially eyed as a short-term operation last summer, Ms. Eiffel was able to turn it into a lease for a few years, Ms. Amsel said.

When it came time to name the gallery, it became a combination of both their names MA for Marie and JU for Jude.

“We are two entrepreneurial women with different strengths and that has made the partnership work,” she said. “Marie and I like to call MAJU our cultural living room.”