February 2016 Programs at the Jewish Museum Feature Writers Deborah Davis and Blake Gopnik, The Mivos Quartet, Symposium Inspired by Unorthodox Exhibition, and More

New York, NY - The Jewish Museum's winter 2016 slate of lectures, discussions, and events continues in February with author Deborah Davis in conversation with art critic Blake Gopnik about her new book on Andy Warhol; The Mivos Quartet performing the music of Steve Reich as part of the Museum’s ongoing partnership with Bang on a Can; and a symposium exploring unconventional approaches to museum programming in conjunction with the current exhibition, Unorthodox.  Other offerings include a panel discussion featuring contemporary Jewish novelists Shulem Deen, Christopher Noxon, and Sigal Samuel; scholar Alan Levenson discussing religion with author Susan Miller Katz; and A Closer Look gallery talks of 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 – FEBRUARY 2016

Author Talk: Deborah Davis and Blake Gopnik

Monday, February 1, 6:30pm

Deborah Davis discusses her new book The Trip: Andy Warhol’s Plastic Fantastic Cross-Country Adventure, which chronicles the cross-country road trip that Warhol took from New York to Los Angeles in 1963, and illuminates how that journey—and the artists and celebrities whom Warhol met along the way—profoundly influenced his life and art.  Davis will be joined by writer and critic Blake Gopnik, author of the upcoming Andy Warhol: A Life as Art, the first comprehensive biography of the Pop artist.

Deborah Davis is the author of eight non-fiction books, including Strapless: John Singer Sargent and the Fall of Madame X; Party of the Century: The Fabulous Story of Truman Capote and His Black and White Ball;  Gilded: How Newport Became the Richest Resort in America; Guest of Honor: Booker T. Washington, Theodore Roosevelt, and The White House Dinner that Shocked a Nation, winner of the Phillis Wheatley Award for best work of History in 2013; and Fabritius and the Goldfinch, which Amazon named one of the Best Books of 2014.

Blake Gopnik is a regular contributor to The New York Times and a frequent guest on Marketplace Radio, while his Daily Pic column goes out to more than 130,000 followers on Tumblr and Twitter and at ArtNet News, where he holds the post of Critic at Large.  He has served as editor of Insite, Canada’s leading magazine on architecture and design; fine arts editor and art critic at The Globe and Mail; chief art critic of The Washington Post; and art and design critic for Newsweek magazine and its Daily Beast website.

Becoming Jewish: Warhol’s Liz and Marilyn presents a close look at two of Andy Warhol’s muses, Elizabeth Taylor and Marilyn Monroe, exploring the Jewish identities of Warhol’s most celebrated subjects. Both Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor converted to Judaism in the 1950s. Warhol was fascinated by their star power and used publicity stills to create his now iconic portraits in the early 1960s. This intimate, single-gallery exhibition features several portraits of these renowned actresses alongside a large selection of photographs, letters, and ephemera, shedding new light on their relationships with Judaism and Warhol’s interest in celebrity culture.

Tickets: $15 adults; $12 students and seniors; $10 Jewish Museum members

 

A Closer Look Gallery Talk: The Power of Pictures: Early Soviet Photography, Early Soviet Film

Tuesday, February 2, 1:30pm

A Jewish Museum educator engages visitors in a discussion about photographs by El Lissitsky on view in the exhibition, The Power of Pictures: Early Soviet Photography, Early Soviet Film.

Free with Museum Admission

 

Bang on a Can: Unorthodox

The Mivos Quartet Plays Steve Reich

Thursday, February 4, 7:30pm

This concert featuring the acclaimed Mivos Quartet celebrates composers who defy conventional forms and genres. The program will feature Reich’s poignant work WTC 9/11 for string quartet and tape, written in response to the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center. The concert will also include Reich’s Holocaust-related masterpiece Different Trains and his intensely contrapuntal Triple Quartet, both for string quartet and tape.

The Mivos Quartet, “one of America’s most daring and ferocious new-music ensembles” (The Chicago Reader), is devoted to performing the works of contemporary composers, presenting new music to diverse audiences. Since the quartet's beginnings in 2008 they have performed and closely collaborated with an ever-expanding group of international composers who represent multiple aesthetics of contemporary classical composition. Commissioning and premiering new music for string quartet is essential to the quartet's mission; Mivos has performed works by such composers as Alex Mincek, Helmut Lachenmann, Anna Clyne, Wolfgang Rihm, Samson Young, Luke DuBois, Philip Glass, Huang Ruo, Felipe Lara, Sam Pluta, Tristan Perich and Kirsten Broberg. They have appeared at The Guggenheim Museum, Kennedy Center, Zankel Hall, MoMA, The Stone, Issue Project Room, and Roulette, among other venues, and have performed as such events as Wien Modern (Vienna, Austria), Darmstadt Internationalen Ferienkurse für Neue Musik (Darmstadt, Germany), Asphalt Festival (Düsseldorf, Germany), Concerti Aperitivo (Udine, Italy), HellHOT! New Music Festival (Hong Kong), Shanghai New Music Week (Shanghai, China), Edgefest (Ann Arbor, MI), and Aldeburgh Music (UK). The members of Mivos are: violinists Olivia De Prato and Joshua Modney, violist Victor Lowrie, and cellist Mariel Roberts, each of whom are recognized individually as extraordinary voices in contemporary music, and perform frequently with leading new music ensembles including Ensemble Signal, Victoire, and Wet Ink.

The Jewish Museum is presenting Unorthodox, a large-scale group exhibition featuring 55 contemporary artists from around the world whose practices mix forms and genres without concern for artistic conventions. Though the artists in Unorthodox come from a wide variety of backgrounds and generations, they are united in their spirit of independence and individuality. Through over 200 works, the exhibition highlights the importance of iconoclasm and art's key role in breaking rules and traditions.

Tickets: $18 general; $15 students and seniors; $12 Jewish Museum and Bang on a Can List members

 

A Closer Look Gallery Talk: Masterpieces & Curiosities: Alfred Stieglitz’s The Steerage

Thursdays, February 4 and 11, 6:00pm

Jewish Museum educators engages visitors in discussion about Alfred Stieglitz’s iconic photograph, The Steerage.

Free with Museum Admission

 

AM at the JM: Liam Gillick

Wednesday, February 17, 8am at Think Coffee, Union Square, 123 Fourth Ave, NYC

Artist Liam Gillick will discuss his recent projects with Jens Hoffmann, Deputy Director, Exhibitions and Public Programs, the Jewish Museum.

Liam Gillick deploys multiple forms to expose the new ideological control systems that emerged at the beginning of the 1990s. He has developed a number of key narratives that often form the engine for a body of work: McNamara (1992 onwards) Erasmus is Late & Ibuka! (1995 onwards) Discussion Island/Big Conference Center (1997 onwards), and Construction of One (2005 onwards). Gillick’s work exposes the dysfunctional aspects of a modernist legacy in terms of abstraction and architecture when framed within a globalized, neo-liberal consensus. His work extends into structural rethinking of the exhibition as a form. In addition he has produced a number of short films since the late 2000s which address the construction of the creative persona in light of the enduring mutability of the contemporary artist as a cultural figure, including Margin Time (2012), The Heavenly Lagoon (2013) and Hamilton: A Film by Liam Gillick (2014). Gillick is currently completing a book on the genealogy of the contemporary artist titled Industry and Intelligence: Contemporary Art Since 1820 for Columbia University Press.

Jens Hoffmann is a curator and writer based in New York. He is currently Deputy Director, Exhibitions and Public Programs at the Jewish Museum in New York. Hoffmann was Director of the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art in San Francisco (2007-12), and Director of Exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London (2003-07). He has curated many exhibitions around the world including the 9th Shanghai Biennale (2012-13), the 12th Istanbul Biennial (2011) and the 2nd San Juan Triennial (2009). He has contributed numerous articles to art magazines such as Frieze, Artforum, Parket, and Texte zur Kunst as well as written over 200 essays for exhibition catalogues and museum publications.

Free

 

Unorthodox: On Religion

Thursday, February 18, 6:30pm

Alan Levenson, Director of the Schusterman Center for Judaic & Israel Studies at the University of Oklahoma, and author of The Making of the Modern Jewish Bible: How Scholars in Germany, Israel, and America Transformed an Ancient Text, will speak with Susan Katz Miller, journalist and author of Being Both: Embracing Two Religions in One Interfaith Family.

 

Alan Levenson holds the Schusterman/Josey Chair in Judaic History at the University of Oklahoma and has written extensively on the Jewish experience for both scholarly and popular audiences. He is considered a leading authority on the modern Jewish experience. His book, Between Philosemitism and Antisemitism: Defenses of Jews and Judaism in Germany, 1871-1932, was nominated for a National Jewish Book Award Prize, and his textbook, Modern Jewish Thinkers, is used widely in classes on Jewish thought. He has won a number of prestigious fellowships, including an ACLS Fellowship in 1999, and has lectured in the United States, Israel and Germany. He has recently completed two major projects: The Making of the Modern Jewish Bible, a history of Bible translations/commentaries in the modern era; and, serving as General Editor, The Wiley-Blackwell History of Jews and Judaism. 

 

Author and journalist Susan Katz Miller is both an interfaith child and an interfaith parent. Her father is Jewish, her mother is Protestant: she grew up in Reform Judaism. After marrying a Protestant, Miller and her husband decided to raise their children in both religions, in a community of interfaith families. Miller has served a journalist with Newsweek, The New York Times, the Christian Science Monitor, and New Scientist. After her children were born, he founded the first blog devoted to interfaith family communities and interfaith identity, onbeingboth.com, and began blogging at Huffington Post Religion. Her work on interfaith families has been featured on NPR’s All Things Considered and Here & Now, and on the PBS program Religion & Ethics Newsweekly. Miller also writes for the Jewish Daily Forward‘s interfaith relationship advice column, “The Seesaw.”

This program is made possible, in part, by the Edmond de Rothschild Foundations.

Tickets: $15 General; $12 Students and Seniors; $10 Members

 

A Closer Look Gallery Talk: Culture and Continuity: The Jewish Journey

Thursday, February 18, 6:00pm

An in-depth conversation on concealed, confronted, and refuted identities in two works of art in the Jewish Museum’s permanent exhibition, Ken Aptekar’s I Hate the Name Kenneth and Robert Arneson’s Simon ‘n Rastus. This program will feature ASL interpretation.

Free with Museum Admission

 

The Jewish Book Council Presents Unpacking the Book

Jewish Writers in Conversation: Apostles and Apostates

Tuesday, February 23, 6:00pm

Authors Shulem Deen, Christopher Noxon, and Sigal Samuel share their unorthodox perspectives on what it means to keep the faith with respect to their writing, their personal lives, and the Jewish people at large.

Shulem Deen is the author of All Who Go Do Not Return, a memoir about growing up in and then leaving the Hasidic Jewish world, which won the 2015 National Jewish Book Award for Contemporary Jewish Life and Practice. His work has appeared in The New Republic, Salon, Tablet Magazine, and the Jewish Daily Forward, among others, and in 2015 he was listed in the Forward 50, an annual list of American Jews with outsized roles on political and social issues. He serves as a board member at Footsteps, a New York City-based organization that offers assistance and support to those who have left the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community.

Christopher Noxon is an author, journalist, and illustrator. He is author of the novel Plus One and of Rejuvenile: Kickball, Cartoons, Cupcakes, and the Reinvention of the American Grown Up. He has written for The New Yorker, Details, The New York Times Magazine, Los Angeles Magazine, and Salon. His illustrations have been featured on The Undo List and in Unscrolled: Writers and Artists Wrestle with the Torah.

Sigal Samuel is an award-winning fiction writer, journalist, essayist, and playwright. Currently opinion editor at the Jewish Daily Forward, she has also published work in The Daily Beast, the Rumpus, BuzzFeed, and Electric Literature. Her six plays have been produced in theaters from Vancouver to New York. The Mystics of Mile End is her first novel.

The Jewish Book Council invites the general public to join the event. Select galleries will be open for attendees from 6:00pm to 7:00pm, and guided tours of a featured exhibition will be offered from 6:15pm to 6:45pm. The conversation with the authors will begin at 7:00pm and will be followed by a reception, book sale, and signing.

The program is free but space is limited and advance RSVP is required for entry. Reservations can be made at jewishbookcouncil.org/events/unpacking-the-book.

 

Unorthodox: On Museums

Sunday, February 28, 2:00pm - 6:30pm

International and New York-based curators, including contributors to the catalogue for the exhibition Unorthodox, discuss the unconventional and nonconformist approaches to programming at their various institutions in a half-day symposium. Speakers include : Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev (Castello di Rivoli); Peter Eleey (MoMA P.S. 1.); Massimiliano Gioni (New Museum); Thelma Golden (The Studio Museum in Harlem); Kathy Halbreich (The Museum of Modern Art); Ruba Katrib (SculptureCenter); Vasif Kortun (SALT Istanbul); Jessica Morgan (Dia Art Foundation); Adriano Pedrosa (São Paulo Museum of Art); Scott Rothkopf (Whitney Museum of American Art); and Nancy Spector (Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum). Moderators include Jens Hoffmann (The Jewish Museum) and Bruce Altshuler (Director, Program in Museum Studies, New York University).

Presented in collaboration with the Program in Museum Studies, New York University.

This program is made possible, in part, by the Edmond de Rothschild Foundations.

Tickets: $12 General; $8 Students, Seniors, and Members

 

A Closer Look Gallery Talk

Monday, February 29, 1:30pm

A Jewish Museum educator engages visitors in a discussion about select works of art on view in Unorthodox.

Free with Museum Admission

 

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, the Edmond de Rothschild Foundations, Genesis Philanthropy Group, and through public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.