November 2015 Programs at the Jewish Museum Focuses on Unorthodox Exhibition, Bassist Robert Black, and More

New York, NY - The Jewish Museum's fall 2015 slate of lectures, discussions, and events continues in November with a series of public programs related to the new exhibition, Unorthodox, developed by the Jewish Museum and presented in collaboration with the 92nd Street Y - programs take place at the Jewish Museum unless otherwise noted.  Other highlights include a concert featuring bassist Robert Black, part of the Museum's partnership with Bang on a Can; a three-part adult studio workshop led by artist Jaqueline Cedar; and the next event in the popular after-hours series, The Wind Up.

Further program and ticket information is available by calling 212.423.3337 or online at TheJewishMuseum.org/calendar.  The Jewish Museum is located at Fifth Avenue and 92nd Street, Manhattan.

 

PROGRAM SCHEDULE – NOVEMBER 2015

 

Bang on a Can: The Power of Pictures

Robert Black, the Hartt Bass Band and Friends

Thursday, November 5, 7:30pm

Composers who were isolated behind the Iron Curtain had to develop their own unique ways of pushing musical boundaries. Bassist and founding member of the Bang on a Can All-Stars Robert Black anchors a program of chamber music by experimental Soviet composers Galina Ustvolskaya, Arthur Lourie, and Sofia Gubaidulaina. A highlight of the concert is a rare performance of Ustvolskaya’s relentless Composition No. 2 for piano, eight double basses, and one giant cube of wood.

Robert Black tours the world creating unheard of music for the solo double bass. He collaborates with the most adventurous composers, musicians, dancers, artists, actors, and technophiles from all walks of life. He has commissioned, collaborated, or performed with musicians from John Cage to D.J. Spooky, Elliott Carter to Meredith Monk, Cecil Taylor to young emerging composers, as well as the Brazilian painter Ige D'Aquino, Japanese choreographer Yoshiko Chuma, the American actor Kathryn Walker, the English sound artist/DJ, Mira Calix and Swiss-American filmmaker, Rudy Burckhardt. Black is a founding member of the Bang on a Can All-Stars. Additional chamber music activities include performances with the Ciompi and Miami String Quartets and annual appearances at the Moab Music Festival.

From early vanguard constructivist works by Alexander Rodchenko and El Lissitzky, to the modernist images of Arkady Shaikhet and Max Penson, Soviet photographers played a pivotal role in the history of modern photography. The Power of Pictures: Early Soviet Photography, Early Soviet Film, on view through February 7, 2016, examines how photography, film, and poster art were harnessed to disseminate Communist ideology, revisiting a moment in history when artists acted as engines of social change and radical political engagement. Covering the period from the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution through the 1930s, the exhibition explores how early modernist photography and film influenced a new Soviet style while energizing and expanding the nature of the media. The Power of Pictures reveals how striking images by master photographers and filmmakers were seen as powerful propaganda tools in the new Soviet Union.

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

 

The Power of Pictures Talkback

Michael Kunichika

Sunday, November 8, 1 pm

Michael Kunichika, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, NJ, leads a discussion following a screening of Battleship Potemkin. (Sergei Eisenstein, 1925, 71 min).

Michael Kunichika's research interests include Russian modernism, silent Russian and Soviet cinema, critical theory, and Russian and Soviet archaeology. He is currently working on his second book on early Soviet cinema and the poetics and politics of time.

Free with Museum Admission; RSVP Recommended

 

Unorthodox: On Curating

Sunday, November 8, 8:30pm – at 92Y

Renowned exhibition maker Hans Ulrich Obrist, Co-Director of Exhibitions, Serpentine Galleries, London, and Unorthodox co-curator Jens Hoffmann, Deputy Director, Exhibitions and Public Programs, at the Jewish Museum, will speak about the highly progressive and even radical curatorial strategies they have employed over their respective careers.

Highly regarded curator Jens Hoffmann joined the Jewish Museum in a newly created position as Deputy Director, Exhibitions and Public Programs in November 2012. Hoffmann is conceptualizing ideas and strategies for exhibitions, acquisitions, publications, research, and public programs, drawing on his global perspective and deep knowledge of contemporary art and visual culture. Formerly Director of the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art in San Francisco from 2007 to 2012 and Director of Exhibitions and Chief Curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London between 2003 and 2007, Hoffmann has organized more than 40 shows internationally since the late 1990s. Hoffmann is known for applying a multi-disciplinary approach to his curatorial practice.

Hans-Ulrich Obrist was named art’s second most powerful figure in 2010 by Art Review, after being its most powerful the previous year. Obrist joined the Serpentine Gallery in 2006, as Co-director of Exhibitions and Programmes, and the Director of International Projects. Prior to this engagement, he served as the Curator of the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, since 2000. Before arriving in Paris, Obrist was curator of Museums in Progress, Vienna, from 1993 until 2000. In all, since 1991 Obrist has curated over 150 exhibitions internationally.

This November, the Jewish Museum will present 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 will highlight the importance of iconoclasm and art’s key role in breaking rules and traditions.

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

Tickets: $32 general public; $22 Jewish Museum and 92Y Members

 

Adult Studio Workshop: Painting the Peculiar

Mondays, November 9, 16, 23, 6:00 -8:30pm

Participants will discover painting techniques and processes that explore personal history and cultural inspirations in this three-session workshop led by contemporary artist Jaqueline Cedar and inspired by the wild array of representational painting styles on view in Unorthodox.

Jaqueline Cedar holds an MFA in Painting from Columbia University and a BA in Art from University of California, Los Angeles. Cedar's work addresses such issues as self-awareness, control, and immobility, staging a potential but arrested movement toward knowledge or engagement. By arranging figures as armatures for hanging line and color, her paintings construct scenarios in which subjects behave both as backdrops and participants, observers and actors. Selected exhibitions of Jaqueline’s work include 106 Green, Fredericks & Freiser, and Dutton in New York, and Wharton + Espinosa in LA. She has also been featured in The Huffington Post and New American Paintings. Her work is included in the current Next Wave exhibition at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. 

Course Fee: $50 general public; $40 Jewish Museum members. All materials included in course fee.

 

Unorthodox: On Exhibitions

Tuesday, November 10, 10:00am – at 92Y and Jewish Museum 

Unorthodox co-curators Kelly Taxter, Assistant Curator, and Daniel S. Palmer, Leon Levy Assistant Curator, at the Jewish Museum speak about their exhibition, the ideas behind it and the artworks exhibited. This talk at 92Y will be followed by an exhibition walkthrough at the Jewish Museum with co-curator Jens Hoffmann, Deputy Director, Exhibitions and Public Programs.

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

Tickets: $34 general public; $19 Jewish Museum and 92Y Members

 

Unorthodox: On Art History

Thursday, November 12, 6:30pm

Art historians and authors Claire Bishop and Joshua Decter discuss the role and function of art in post-avant-garde times — particularly the notion of the historical avant-garde as challenging orthodoxies across disciplines, with those avant-garde heterodoxies eventually becoming orthodoxies in their own right.

Claire Bishop is an art historian, critic, author, and Professor in the History of Art Department at CUNY Graduate Center, New York since September 2008. Previously Bishop was an associate professor in the Department of Art History at the University of Warwick, Coventry from 2006 to 2008 and Visiting Professor in the Curating Contemporary Art Department at the Royal College of Art, London from 2001 to 2006. She completed her Ph.D at Essex University in 2002. Bishop is editor of the highly regarded volumes Participation (2006) and Installation Art: A Critical History (2005) and is a contributor to many art journals including Artforum, Flash Art, and October; her essay “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” which appeared in October 2004, remains an influential critique of relational aesthetics. Her books have been translated into over seventeen languages and Her current research addresses the impact of digital technologies on contemporary art, as well as questions of amateurism and 'de-skilling' in contemporary dance and performance art.

Joshua Decter is a New York-based writer, curator, art historian, and theorist who has contributed to Artforum, Afterall, Mousse, The Exhibitionist and other international periodicals. He has curated exhibitions at PS1 (now MoMA PS1), The Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, Apex Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, The Kunsthalle Vienna, the Santa Monica Museum of Art, and other institutions. Decter is the author of Art Is a Problem: Selected Criticism, Essays, Interviews and Curatorial Projects (1986-2012), published by JRP|Ringier in 2013, and co-author of Exhibition as Social Intervention: ‘Culture in Action’ 1993, published by Afterall in 2014. He is a faculty member at the School of Visual Art’s M.A. Curatorial Practice program, and also teaches at Cooper Union.

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

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

 

Unorthodox: On Art I

Tuesday, November 17, 6:30pm

A book launch celebrating Erna Rosenstein. I Can Repeat Only Unconsciously, a new publication on the work of Unorthodox participating artist Erna Rosenstein (1913-2004). Authors Dorota Jarecka and Barbara Piwowarska will be in conversation with artist R.H. Quaytman, with an introduction by Unorthodox co-curator Daniel S. Palmer.

Erna Rosenstein was born in Krakow to a Polish Jewish family, and studied painting at the Krakow Academy of Fine Arts.  Founder of an underground Communist cell before World War II, she was tried for her radical activities during the war and witnessed the murders of her parents.  She survived the Nazi occupation by using various aliases and carrying fake documents with Christian names.  These traumatic events became inspiration for her work, which calls upon a language of Surrealism to protest official state cultural policies. By distorting found objects, she asserts the ennobling power of the creative process in even the most terrible of circumstances.

Barbara Piwowarska is an independent curator and art historian specializing in contemporary art and the legacy of the avant-garde. She was recipient of The Kościuszko Foundation scholarship at the Museum of Modern Art, and was curator of Jadwiga Maziarska. Atlas of the Imaginary, CCA Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw; Film Matters, Beton7, Athens; Jadwiga Maziarska 1913–2003, Johnen Galerie, Berlin; and Footnote Project, Miguel Abreu Gallery, NY, Silberkuppe, Berlin, and MUMOK, Vienna. She co-curated Polish Socialist Conceptualism of the 70s, Orchard, NY; Polish New Wave, Tate Modern, London  and Anthology Film Archives, NY; Die, COCO Kunstverein, Vienna; The Third Room, Kunsthalle Düsseldorf and Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw; and Erna Rosenstein. I Can Repeat Only Unconsciously, Foksal Gallery Foundation.   She has contributed to Art Review, Art Margins, Spike Art Quarterly, Art in America, Bidoun, and Praesens: Central European Art Review.

Art historian and art critic Dorota Jarecka has been published in such magazines as Res Publica Nova, Dialog, and Newsweek. She is co-editor of Krystiana Robb-Narbutt. Rysunki, przedmioty, pracownia / Krystiana Robb Narbut. Drawings, Objects, Studio and Natalia LL. Doing Gender (2013).  A member of the Citizens’ Forum for Contemporary Art and the International Association of Art Critics / AICA, she was awarded the Jerzy Stajuda Prize for Art Criticism in 2012.

R.H. Quaytman is a Connecticut based artist. She was director of Orchard, a cooperative gallery in New York, open from 2005 to 2008. Recent solo exhibitions include חקק, Chapter 29, Miguel Abreu, New York and the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Israel (2015), and O Tópico, Chapter 27, Gladstone Gallery, New York (2014); and she has participated in numerous group shows including America is Hard to See, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2015); Carl Andre, Liz Deschenes, Richard Prince, R. H. Quaytman, Galerie Buchholz, Cologne (2014); and In the Heart of the Country, The Collection of the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw (2014). Quaytman, along with Michael Krebber, was the recipient of the 2015 Wolfgang Hahn Prize and will have a one person show at MOCA, Los Angeles in 2016.

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

Free with RSVP

 

Unorthodox: On Art II

Thursday, November 19, 6:00pm

Unorthodox artists Austė, Brian Belott, Meriem Bennani, Brian DeGraw, Tommy Hartung, Nick Payne, Phillip Smith, Jeni Spota, Jamian Juliano-Villani, and others discuss their artistic practices with co-curators Kelly Taxter and Daniel S. Palmer. Presented as part of Performa 15.

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

Free with Pay-What-You-Wish Admission, RSVP Recommended

 

The Wind Up: Power of Pictures

Thursday, November 19, 8:00pm

The Museum’s after-hours series featuring art making, live performance, and gallery tours celebrates the innovative photography and film on view in The Power of Pictures: Early Soviet Photography, Early Soviet Film.

The Wind Up: The Power of Pictures is made possible, in part, through the generosity of Genesis Philanthropy Group.

Tickets: $13 in Advance; $18 at the Door

 

A Closer Look Gallery Talks

Tuesday, November 3, 2 pmand Mondays, November 16, 23, and 30, 1:30pm

Educators engage visitors in discussions about select works of art in The Power of Pictures: Early Soviet Photography, Early Soviet Film on November 3 and in Unorthodox on November 16, 23, and 30.

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.