The Jewish Museum

Profile

Located on New York City's famed Museum Mile, the Jewish Museum is a distinctive hub for art and Jewish culture for people of all backgrounds. Founded in 1904, the Museum was the first institution of its kind in the United States and is one of the oldest Jewish museums in the world. Devoted to exploring art and Jewish culture from ancient to contemporary, the Museum offers diverse exhibitions and programs, and maintains a unique collection of nearly 30,000 works of art, ceremonial objects, and media reflecting the global Jewish experience over more than 4,000 years.

Current Temporary Exhibition

Marc Camille Chaimowicz: Your Place or Mine…
On view through August 5, 2018

Marc Camille Chaimowicz is known as an artist who travels between the fine art and design worlds, and likes to combine both as often as possible. Throughout his career, the home has been a vital source of inspiration. Marc Camille Chaimowicz: Your Place or Mine... includes objects that hover somewhere between sculpture and furniture, seemingly functional, but always keeping one foot in the world of fantasy. For example, a writing desk is tipped to balance on one edge. A chaise flips to become a straight-backed chair. A dressing table looks like someone left it in disarray after getting ready for a night out.

This is the London-based artist's first solo museum exhibition in the United States. It presents Chaimowicz's work in painting, drawing, collage, sculpture, installation, furniture, lighting, ceramics, textiles, and wallpaper made between 1978 and 2018, including never before exhibited pieces and three new commissions.

Upcoming Temporary Exhibition
Chaim Soutine: Flesh May 4-September 16, 2018

The Jewish Museum will present an exhibition of 32 paintings by the artist Chaim Soutine (1893-1943), the Expressionist known for his gestural and densely painted canvases. Chaim Soutine: Flesh highlights the unique visual conceptions and painterly energy that the artist brought to the tradition of still-life. Soutine’s remarkable paintings depicting hanging fowl, beef carcasses, and rayfish are now considered among his greatest artistic achievements. These works epitomize his fusion of Old Master influences with the tenets of painterly modernism. Virtuoso technique, expressive color, and disorienting and unexpected compositions endow Soutine’s depictions of slaughtered animals with a striking visual power and emotional impact.

New Collection Exhibition

In January 2018, for the first time in 25 years, the Jewish Museum opened a new, major exhibition of its unparalleled collection. Scenes from the Collection transforms the Museum’s entire third floor with nearly 600 works from antiquities to contemporary art. Art and Jewish objects are shown together, affirming universal values that are shared among people of all faiths and backgrounds.

The Jewish Museum’s collection spans more than 4,000 years through nearly 30,000 objects, including painting, sculpture, photography, decorative arts, ceremonial objects, antiquities, works on paper, and media. Viewed through a contemporary lens, the collection is a mirror of Jewish identities past and present. Scenes from the Collection allows viewers to consider what, why, and how the Museum has collected and what this says about the changing identity of the institution, and evolving intersections of art, Jewish culture, and world events.

Instead of a single narrative, Scenes from the Collection is divided into seven different sections, or scenes, highlighting the diversity and depth of the collection. Each one reveals the ways in which the presentation of art and history are shaped by context and perspective. The new installation is a powerful expression of artistic and cultural creativity as well as a reflection of the continual evolution that is the essence of Jewish identity. This unique mix of art and ceremonial objects speaks of the many strands of Jewish tradition, culture, spirituality, and history. The stories the works of art tell illuminate multiple perspectives on being Jewish in the past and present, how Jewish culture intersects with art, and how it is part of the larger world of global interconnections.

Unlike its predecessor, Culture & Continuity: The Jewish Journey (on view from 1993 to 2017), Scenes from the Collection is flexible, with several scenes changing annually, and one changing every six months, so that different subjects can be examined while audiences are offered opportunities to see as much of the collection as possible, including new acquisitions.

The different sections or “scenes” in Scenes from the Collection are:

Constellations

Some of the most powerful works in the collection are those that express aspects of Jewish culture, history, or values, while also reflecting universal issues of art and its relationship to society. In “Constellations,” nearly 50 of the most significant works in the collection are exhibited as individual gems but with thematic connections to one another. Issues explored include transforming and transcending tradition, cultural distinctiveness and universality, and the ever-changing nature of identity. Works by such artists as Mel Bochner, Nicole Eisenman, Eva Hesse, Lee Krasner, Camille Pissarro, Mark Rothko, Joan Snyder, and Kehinde Wiley are included. A diverse selection of Hanukkah lamps and other ceremonial objects drawn from the Museum’s renowned collection—from the 3rd to the 21st centuries, and Europe, North Africa, Asia, and the United States—are also on view.

Taxonomies

“Taxonomies” is organized as a contemporary Wunderkammer (Cabinet of Wonders), a historical style of display first popularized during the Renaissance and recognized as a precursor of today’s museums. This scene is crowded with works of art and artifacts of various origins and materials, revealing interesting relationships between objects in the collection. Objects on view range from Torah ornaments made from ivory and a model of the ancient Temple of Jerusalem in a bottle to replicas of ancient sailing ships to a spice container by Lucy Puls (2006).

Masterpieces and Curiosities

“Masterpieces and Curiosities” is a series of installations focusing on single works from the Museum’s collection. The first iteration, on view through August 5, 2018, features a bracelet of charms assembled by Greta Perlman (1904-1975) in Theresienstadt, a camp-ghetto in the former Czechoslovakia that housed prisoners between 1941 and 1945. Intimate creations such as the bracelet gave some meaning to the lives of inmates in the ghetto. Additional works that were created in Theresienstadt are also displayed. Recent images of the ghetto by contemporary photographer Judith Glickman Lauder provide a stark contrast between the dehumanizing conditions imposed by the Nazis and the beauty of the pieces created by prisoners.

Accumulations

This section spotlights an aspect of museum collecting: the accumulation of multiple examples of a given work. The first iteration, on view through September 16, 2018, features a collection of 100 stereoscopic photographs taken around 1900 of what was then called the Holy Land, including such sites as the Western Wall and the Dead Sea.

Signs and Symbols

This section explores the significance of a particular iconic element or motif in a variety of works. The first iteration, on view through January 6, 2019, examines the meaning of the Star of David within Jewish contexts as well as the various interpretations of the six-pointed star as a widespread motif in other cultures. Works on view range from a Bohemian Hanukkah lamp (probably 18th century) that uses the star as an emblem for this Czech Jewish community to Persian and Indian Judaica that feature the symbol as an expression of late 19th and early 20th-century Zionist sentiment. A ceramic beer pitcher from the late 19th century decorated with the star is also on display, attesting to secular use of the hexagram as a symbol for beer in Europe. Examples of post-Holocaust art are also featured, including Morris Louis’s Man Reaching for a Star (1952), and in Dana Frankfort’s Star of David (Orange) (2007), the artist intends the star to be a symbol that anyone can make the subject of a work of art.

Television and Beyond

An important part of the Museum’s collection is explored in this section: the National Jewish Archive of Broadcasting (NJAB). With more than 4,000 holdings, the archive is the largest and most comprehensive body of broadcast materials on Jewish culture in the United States. A selection of television clips rotating every six months, inspired by the archive, examine how Jews have been portrayed and portray themselves, and how mass media has addressed issues of religion, ethnicity, and diversity. The first program, “Friends and Family,” on view through August 6, 2018, highlights current television shows that disrupt previous norms of the family sitcom, expanding the notion of family to include invented and extended families and circles of intimate friends. Excerpts from such shows as Broad City, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, Difficult People, Fresh Off the Boat, Grace and Frankie, Orange is the New Black, and Transparent are shown.

Personas

The Jewish Museum’s collection includes portraits dating from antiquity to the present, most either by Jewish artists or of Jewish sitters. A selection drawn from the Museum’s large and rich collection of portraits from different times and places make up this section. Seen together, the portraits offer remarkable insights into a range of social, political, and historical circumstances. The first iteration, on view through March 24, 2019, features self-portraits by such artists as Nan Goldin, Louise Nevelson, Man Ray, Ringl + Pit, and Cindy Sherman, among others. Moritz Daniel Oppenheim’s early nineteenth-century canvas shows a man proud of his academic training. Lee Krasner, a century later, depicts a young woman whose firm gaze expresses her determined self-definition as a painter. The feminist artists Hannah Wilke and Joan Semmel each rework the tradition of the nude to propose a self-possessed female sexuality. In works by Ross Bleckner and Deborah Kass, the self is evoked through symbolic forms associated with the artists’ identities as queer Jews.

The Jewish Museum Shop
The Jewish Museum Shop offers the world’s finest selection of Jewish ceremonial objects and products representative of contemporary and traditional Jewish art and culture. Included is an extensive selection of merchandise reflecting the Museum’s current exhibitions and permanent collection, as well as distinctive gifts for men and women, Museum reproductions and adaptations, jewelry, books, toys and inspired objects created by artists exclusively for the shop – all relating to Jewish life. A large selection of ketubot (beautifully decorated marriage contracts) and wedding registry services are also available.

Guided Group Tours
A unique group tour for adults or university groups experience can be arranged at the Jewish Museum with a guided tour of a Jewish Museum exhibition. Works of art on view are brought to life through a lively docent-led tour, elaborating on themes addressed in the galleries.

Guided School Group Tours (pre-K – 12)
Make the Jewish Museum your classroom through thematic gallery tours that build on curricula, contextualize artworks, and incorporate activities and inquiry-based discussion. The Museum also offers customizable group visits to classes whose students have special needs.

Family Fun
The Jewish Museum offers a wide array of family programs providing unique, engaging, and often unexpected museum experiences, full of fresh perspectives, playful activities, and numerous opportunities for artistic and cultural enrichment. Diverse offerings for families include lively concerts, innovative art workshops, and fun-filled Sunday programming.

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