Culture and Continuity: The Jewish Journey at The Jewish Museum, New York

At the heart of The Jewish Museum is its permanent exhibition, Culture and Continuity: The Jewish Journey, representing one of the world's great opportunities to explore Jewish culture and history through art. The final phase of an extensive reinstallation opened to the public on April 11th, 2003. This vibrant two-floor exhibition features 800 works from the Museum's remarkably diverse collection of art, archaeology, ceremonial objects, video, photographs, interactive media and television excerpts. It examines the Jewish experience as it has evolved from antiquity to the present, over 4,000 years, and asks two vital questions: How has Judaism been able to thrive for thousands of years across the globe, often in difficult and even tragic circumstances? What constitutes the essence of Jewish identity?

The exhibition traces the dynamic interaction among three catalysts that have shaped the Jewish experience: the constant questioning and reinterpretation of Jewish traditions, the interaction of Jews and Judaism with other cultures, and the impact of historical events that have transformed Jewish life. Culture and Continuity: The Jewish Journey proposes that Jews have been able to sustain their identity, despite wide dispersion and sometimes tragic circumstances, by evolving a culture that can adapt to life in many countries and under various conditions. Survival as a people has depended upon both the continuity of Jewish ideas and values and the flexibility to adapt to changing circumstances.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Inner Realities: Self-Taught Artists from The Jewish Museum Collection, New York
September 02, 2005 - October 23, 2005

Photo: Meichel Pressman, The Seder, 1950, watercolor on paper, 22¼ x 18½ in.(56.5 x 47 cm). The Jewish Museum (Gift of Dr. Harry Pressman, JM 10-53). Photo © The Jewish Museum. Photo by John Parnell.

Inner Realities: Self-Taught Artists from The Jewish Museum Collection focuses on Israeli and American painters whose intriguing works emanate from their personal history and identity as Jews. Unconcerned with or unaware of academic techniques, these artists invent unique systems of scale, perspective, and figuration to express their feelings and experiences. The themes comment on religious traditions as well as the social and political environment. Characterized by simple forms, strong design, and surprising juxtapositions, their idiosyncratic images speak with powerful directness.

Drawn from the collection of The Jewish Museum, the paintings encompass Jewish holidays, scenes of daily life, and biblical themes running the gamut from the joyous to the tragic. Meichel Pressman’s The Seder and Gabriel Cohen’s Exodus present two different perspectives on the Passover story, one depicting the annual commemoration of the biblical exodus from Egypt, the other offering a contemporary metaphor for exile. While Pressman nostalgically depicts a Polish-Jewish family seated together for the ritual meal, Cohen divides his post-Holocaust landscape into tiers that separate the subjugated from their armed rulers. For all these artists, memory and a vivid imagination act as catalysts in the creation of astonishing pictorial worlds.

Old Country
July 01, 2005 - October 31, 2005

Photo: Still from Old Country
courtesy of Kaeja d'Dance

Old Country (2004)—a 24-minute film adapted from stage work by the Toronto-based company Kaeja d’Dance—offers a contemporary perspective on a European community confronted with the Holocaust. Set in Kutno, Poland in 1939 and in Ottawa, Canada in 2003, the film reflects on tensions between Poles and Jews in a small town. As German soldiers approach Kutno, family members disappear, friendships erode, and lives are betrayed. The film takes the viewer on a kinetic journey using rich cinematography, fluid movement, expressive poetry, and a powerful score. Old Country is based on personal memories of the choreographer's father during World War II.

Old Country premiered on CBC Television in 2004 and is a recent acquisition to The Jewish Museum’s National Jewish Archive of Broadcasting. Founded in 1991, Kaeja d’Dance is a Toronto-based dance company co-directed by Allen and Karen Kaeja. Their work has been presented at festivals in North America, Europe and Asia and at venues including the Banff Centre for the Performing Arts, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, and The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Joan Snyder: A Painting Survey, 1969-2005
August 12, 2005 - October 23, 2005

Photo: Joan Snyder (American, born 1940)
Green Flowers with Kaddish, 1997. Oil, acrylic on linen
28" x 38"

The exhibition has been organized by the Danforth Museum of Art in Framingham, Massachusetts, to which it will travel in November, 2005.

The Jewish Museum presents Joan Snyder: A Painting Survey, 1969-2005, an exhibition that features a selection of thirty-one major works representing more than three decades of the artist’s career. Joan Snyder is an avowed feminist and belongs to the first generation of women artists to identify themselves as such. Along with Elizabeth Murray, Mary Heilman, and Miriam Schapiro, Snyder strove to tame the heroic gestures of male-dominated Abstract Expressionism into a new intimate painterly language. The paintings on view range from monumental (some as large as six by twelve feet) to modest in scale. They take the viewer by surprise as the artist skillfully invests the large canvases with an intensely personal sensibility and the smaller ones with astonishing grandeur.

Snyder gained early recognition with her "stroke paintings" which she made between 1969 and 1973. These works relied on the repeated gesture of a paint-laden brush applied over a grid penciled on the canvas. With the physicality of their drips and marks, the stroke paintings exploited new opportunities for narrative within abstraction. The tension between narrative content and formalism in these works may be seen in the larger context of the art world of the late 1960s, in which cool, hard-edged minimalism was pervasive and painting with any emotional reference was suspect. The artist has said that the strokes are about paint itself—paint moving across the canvas; paint as medium for feelings, sensations, or sounds; paint suggesting a storyline. After making these abstractions, Snyder felt the need to create more complex works, which express her political and social concerns. She moved on to paintings that integrate personal associations she has with her family, feminism, her Jewish heritage, spirituality, and the environment. Consequently her work moved from an implied narrative about the act of making art to a more personal narrative.

Snyder’s works serve as a barometer of her emotional life, simultaneously reflecting specific places in which she has lived, as well as her social concerns and commitment. Works such as Women in Camps (1988) and Study for Morning Requiem with Kaddish (1987-88, in The Jewish Museum’s collection), attest to the artist’s ongoing engagement with social issues, while Moonfield (1986) and Ode to the Pumpkin Field (1986) reveal a feeling of physical and spiritual kinship in nature. Many of the paintings from the 1990s are requiems for the deceased. The devastating losses from AIDS prompted Journey of the Souls (1993), and The Cherry Tree (1993) was inspired by a fruit tree she had seen in a Brooklyn yard as she was driving to visit her dying father. The cherry tree as a metaphor of life and death recurred in many other paintings by Snyder in the 1990s and provided her with a sense of release from grief. Snyder often incorporates collage elements—cloth, dried flowers, branches, seeds, plastic novelties—and painted graffiti-like writing. This scrawled writing, sometimes incised into the paint layer, is as much a part of her artistic vocabulary as the images themselves. In Snyder’s intuitive approach, sensation and idea, image and text, emotion and material fuse to create her unique and highly personal canvases.