THE JEWISH IDENTITY PROJECT: NEW AMERICAN PHOTOGRAPHY
Through January 29, 2006
The Jewish Museum
Fifth Avenue at 92nd Street, New York, NY
http://www.thejewishmuseum.org
Nikki S. Lee, The Wedding (3) from the Parts series, 2005, C-print mounted on aluminum. Courtesy of Leslie Tonkonow Artworks Projects.
In The Jewish Identity Project: New American Photography ten commissioned photography, video, and multimedia installation projects by thirteen artists explore Jewish diversity and challenge conventional ways of representing ethnicity in the United States today. Works by Dawoud Bey, Tirtza Even and Brian Karl, Rainer Ganahl, Nikki S. Lee, Shari Rothfarb Mekonen and Avishai Mekonen, Yoshua Okon, Jaime Permuth, Andrea Robbins and Max Becher, Jessica Shokrian, and Chris Verene are included. By collaborating with their subjects through a variety of means, these artists have pushed the limits of traditional documentary, artistic and aesthetic approaches to investigate the nature of photographic media and its ability to create truthful representations.
Dawoud Bey, Nikki S. Lee, Chris Verene, Shari Rothfarb Mekonen and Avishai Mekonen look at contemporary American Jewishness across racial, ethnic, and geographic borders. Their works embrace a variety of aesthetic and narrative approaches in visualizing the experiences of being a Jew of Asian, Latino, Middle Eastern, African American, Native American, European or mixed heritage. Projects by Rainer Ganahl, Jessica Shokrian, Andrea Robbins and Max Becher explore what Jewishness is and to what extent America is home to Jews and other immigrant groups. Works by Jaime Permuth, Yoshua Okon, Tirtza Even and Brian Karl address how individuals with different cultural and ethnic backgrounds experience or envision Jewishness.
Following its New York showing at The Jewish Museum, the exhibition travels to the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles (March 24 through August 27, 2006).
JOAN SNYDER: A PAINTING SURVEY, 1969-2005
Through October 23, 2005
Over 30 of Joan Snyders major works are being presented at The Jewish Museum in New York in the most comprehensive museum survey of the artists paintings to date. Paintings on view range from the monumental (some as large as six by twelve feet) to modest in scale. Joan Snyder first achieved recognition in the 1970s, with her stroke paintings. Eventually, she felt the need to move beyond these grid-based abstractions to create works that were at once more complex and personally resonant. Joan Snyder is a painter who embraces the formal qualities of abstraction while imbuing her work with narrative content that is often deeply personal and politically motivated. In her canvases she combines rich color, dramatic brushwork, and the sensuous application of a wide range of materials and colors such as velvet, silk, papier-mâché, straw, and plastic. This mid-career review has been organized by the Danforth Museum of Art in Framingham, Massachusetts, where it will be on view from November 10, 2005 through February 5, 2006.
