December 2016 Programs at The Jewish Museum Feature Artists Christian Boltanski and Mary Reid Kelly, and More

New York, NY - The Jewish Museum’s fall 2016 slate of lectures, discussions, and events continues in December with renowned artist Christian Boltanski in conversation with the Jewish Museum's Jens Hoffmann, and 2016 MacArthur Fellow Mary Reid Kelley presenting a selection of her video art.  Other highlights includes an adult studio art workshop; a behind-the-scenes gallery talk led by Jewish Museum Associate Curator Kelly Taxter; and gallery discussions on specific themes and topics related to current exhibitions.

Further program and ticket information is available by calling 212.423.3337 or online at TheJewishMuseum.org/calendar.  All programs are at the Jewish Museum, Fifth Avenue and 92nd Street, Manhattan, unless otherwise indicated.

PROGRAM SCHEDULE – DECEMBER 2016

Adult Studio Workshop: Art for Sharing
Sunday, December 4, 1:30pm – 5:30 pm
Inspired by concepts of generosity, metaphor, and communication found in the exhibition Take Me (I’m Yours), and taught by Golnar Adili, this workshop invites participants to create artworks in multiples that can be given away during the holiday season. Learn a variety of techniques for printmaking, stenciling, and gold leafing while constructing dimensional cards and other works on paper.

Golnar Adili is currently based in Brooklyn, NY and holds a Master's degree in architecture from the University of Michigan. Adili has been an artist in residence at the Rockefeller Foundation for the Arts, Smack Mellon, the MacDowell Colony, Lower East Side Printshop, and Women’s Studio Workshop. She received the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant, the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, Puffin Foundation Grant, and the Urban Artist Initiative grant. Adili’s work has been shown at the Craft and Folk Art Museum in Los Angeles, Cue Art Foundation, International Print Center in NY, Brooklyn Arts Council, and the Lower East Side Printshop. Her solo exhibition at the Kentler International Drawing Space in Brooklyn, NY was on view in September and October 2016.

Take Me (I’m Yours) at the Jewish Museum, on view through February 5, 2017, is an unconventional exhibition featuring artworks that visitors are encouraged to touch, participate in, and even take home. Forty-two international and intergenerational artists are featured, many of whom created new and site-specific works for the exhibition. In a traditional museum visit, people may experience art only by looking at the paintings, sculptures, or photographs on view. You are not usually allowed to touch the works, and certainly not able to take them home. Take Me (I’m Yours) aims to create a democratic space for all visitors to take ownership of artworks, and curate their personal art collections by subverting the usual politics of value, consumerism, and the museum experience.

Course Fee: $90 general; $75 Jewish Museum members
All materials included


The New York Jewish Film Festival Presents
Artist Focus: Mary Reid Kelley
Thursday, December 8, 6:30pm
A month before the New York Jewish Film Festival, co-presented by the Jewish Museum and the Film Society of Lincoln Center in January, the Festival continues off-season Artist Focus series, spotlighting artists whose work transcends the domains of visual arts and cinema. 2016 MacArthur Fellow Mary Reid Kelley, together with her collaborator Patrick Kelley, will present and discuss recent video work with Jens Hoffmann, Director of Special Exhibitions and Public Programs, The Jewish Museum and the New York Jewish Film Festival.

Chosen as a 2016 MacArthur Fellow, Mary Reid Kelley combines painting, performance, and her distinctive wordplay-rich poetry in polemical, graphically stylized videos. Made in collaboration with her partner Patrick Kelley, these videos have been exhibited in solo exhibitions at the Hammer Museum, the ICA Boston, the Neuer Kunstverein Wien, and SITE Santa Fe. Upcoming European solo exhibitions include Kunsthalle Bremen and Museum M, Leuven. Their video work has been reviewed in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, W Magazine, La Reppublica, Vogue, The New Yorker, Artforum, Flash Art, Frieze, ARTnews, and Art in America. Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley’s most recent film, This Is Offal (2016), won the Baloise Prize at Art Basel.

Jens Hoffmann joined the Jewish Museum in November 2012. Formerly Director of the CCA-Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts in San Francisco from 2007 to 2012 and Director of Exhibitions and Chief Curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London from 2003 to 2007, Hoffmann has organized more than 50 shows internationally including major biennials like the 12th Istanbul Biennial (2011) and the 9th Shanghai Biennial (2012).  Shows curated at the Jewish Museum include Other Primary Structures (2014), Repetition and Difference (2015), Unorthodox (2015), Roberto Burle Marx: Brazilian Modernist (2016), and Take Me (I’m Yours) (2016).

Free with Pay-What-You-Want Admission; RSVP Recommended


This Is How We Do It
Masterpieces & Curiosities: Memphis Does Hanukkah
Tuesday, December 13, 2:30pm
Kelly Taxter, Associate Curator, The Jewish Museum, discusses the process of organizing the exhibition, Masterpieces & Curiosities: Memphis Does Hanukkah.

Masterpieces & Curiosities: Memphis Does Hanukkah, on view through February 12, 2017, showcases Los Angeles-based designer and artist Peter Shire's Menorah #7 (1986), and is part of a series of exhibitions focused on individual works in the Jewish Museum's world-renowned collection. Balancing tradition and innovation, the colorful and playful Menorah #7 (1986) is Peter Shire's interpretation of the primary ritual object of Hanukkah. Shire was an original member of the Memphis design collective, initiated by designer and architect Ettore Sottsass, spawned in 1980s Milan. Surrounding Menorah #7 are pieces by other members of the Memphis group, images, and ephemera related to both Shire and the collective, as well as a selection of objects from the Jewish Museum's collection. Memphis Does Hanukkah opens up a conversation about the relationships and dissonances between art and design, tradition and innovation, ceremony and interpretation, and the importance of iconoclasm.

Free with Museum Admission; RSVP Recommended


Dialogue and Discourse: Christian Boltanski and Jens Hoffmann
Thursday, December 15, 6:30pm
The Jewish Museum's installation of Take Me (I'm Yours) is discussed by Christian Boltanski, who with along with curator Hans Ulrich Obrist originated Take Me (I'm Yours) in 1995 at the Serpentine Galleries, London, and Jens Hoffmann, Director of Special Exhibitions and Public Programs, The Jewish Museum, and co-curator of the current exhibition.

Photographer, painter, sculptor, and installation artist Christian Boltanski was born in Paris on September 6, 1944, to a Ukrainian Jewish father and a Corsican mother.  Boltanski's work deals with the concepts of loss, memory, childhood, and death, often functioning as memorials or shrines to collective cultural rituals and events. Many of his installations may reference the lives lost in the Holocaust, striking both collective societal and personal chords.  His first solo exhibition, La vie impossible de Christian Boltanski (The Impossible Life of Christian Boltanski), was held at the Thétre le Ranelagh, Paris in 1968.   Since the 1970s Boltanski has been included in a number of important shows, exhibiting the Musée d'art moderne de la Ville de Paris (1970); Documenta 5 in Kassel, Germany (1972); Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, Germany (1973); Venice Biennale Architettura (1975). And Documenta 8, Kassel (1987).  More recently he has had solo shows at the Institut Mathildenhöhe, Darmstadt, Germany (2006); La maison rouge, Fondation Antoine de Galbert, Paris (2008); and Kunstmuseum Lichtenstein, Vaduz (2009). Boltanski lives and works in the Malakoff neighborhood of Paris with his wife, Annette Messager, with whom he occasionally collaborates on projects.

Free with Museum Admission; RSVP Recommended

Gallery Talks
Fridays, December 2, 9 and 16, 2pm
45-minute gallery discussions on specific themes and topics in current exhibitions, led by members of the Education Department.

Friday, December 2
John Singer Sargent: Mrs. Carl Meyer and Her Children
Led by Nelly Silagy Benedek, Director of Education

Friday, December 9
Pierre Chareau: Collecting Modern Art
Led by Jenna Weiss, Manager of Public Programs

Friday, December 16
Take Me (I’m Yours): Framing and Reframing
Led by Chris Gartrell, Assistant Manager of Adult Programs

Free with Museum Admission – RSVP Recommended

Support
Public programs are made possible by endowment support from the William Petschek Family, the Trustees of the Salo W. and Jeannette M. Baron Foundation, Barbara and Benjamin Zucker, the late William W. Hallo, the late Susanne Hallo Kalem, the late Ruth Hallo Landman, the Marshall M. Weinberg Fund, with additional support from Marshall M. Weinberg, the Rita J. and Stanley H. Kaplan Foundation, the Saul and Harriet M. Rothkopf Family Foundation, and Ellen Liman. Additional support is provided by Lorraine and Martin Beitler and through public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.