November 2016 Programs at the Jewish Museum Feature Actress Tovah Feldshuh as Golda Meir, Scholar Kenneth Frampton, and More

New York, NY - The Jewish Museum continues its fall 2016 slate of lectures, discussions, and events in November with Wish You Were Here: Golda Meir portrayed by award-winning actress Tovah Feldshuh, in conversation with the Jewish Museum's Jens Hoffmann; and noted architect and critic Kenneth Frampton discussing the Maison de Verre (The Glass House), Pierre Chareau's signature building in Paris.  Other highlights include a concert by Pauline Oliveros as part of the Museum's ongoing partnership with Bang on a Can; a lecture by curator Norman Kleeblatt on the legacy of Jewish patronage in portraiture; 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 – NOVEMBER 2016

Bang on a Can: Performance by Pauline Oliveros
Thursday, November 10, 7:30pm
Bang on a Can and the Jewish Museum are presenting the second concert of their 2016-2017 concert season featuring seminal American composer Pauline Oliveros. Accompanying the exhibition, Take Me (I’m Yours), the concert will feature Oliveros performing The Sound of Meditation on V-Accordion, an instrument that produces both accordion and orchestral sounds. Like the exhibition, the concert also blurs the boundary between the performer and the audience by asking the listener to participate in the making of music.

Since the 1960s Pauline Oliveros has influenced American music profoundly through her work with improvisation, meditation, electronic music, myth and ritual. In the 1950s she was part of a circle of iconoclastic composers, artists, poets in San Francisco. She is the recipient of the John Cage award for 2012 from the Foundation of Contemporary Arts, and serves as Distinguished Research Professor of Music at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY and Darius Milhaud Artist-in-Residence at Mills College. She has been as interested in finding new sounds as in finding new uses for old ones – her primary instrument is the accordion, perhaps an unexpected visitor to the musical cutting edge. She is the founder of "Deep Listening," which she describes as a way of listening in every possible way to everything possible to hear no matter what you are doing. Such intense listening includes the sounds of daily life, of nature, of one's own thoughts as well as musical sounds. “Deep Listening is my life practice," she explains, simply. Oliveros is the founder of the Center For Deep Listening at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY, formerly the Pauline Oliveros Foundation.

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 are creating 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. Visitors constantly transform the landscape of the galleries, bit by bit, through direct engagement.

Tickets: $18 General; $15 Students and Seniors; $12 Jewish Museum and Bang on a Can Members


Wish You Were Here: Golda Meir
Sunday, November 13, 6:30pm
Acclaimed actress, singer, and playwright Tovah Feldshuh appears as Golda Meir in an unusual evening of conversation with Jens Hoffmann, Director of Special Exhibitions and Public Programs, inspired by Andy Warhol’s Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century (1980). This program serves as a prelude to Feldshuh’s performance of William Gibson’s Golda’s Balcony on Sunday, December 11 and is held in conjunction with the All About Golda festival organized The Temple Emanu-El Skirball Center.

Tovah Feldshuh has been a Broadway star for more than four decades, earning four Tony Award nominations and winning four Drama Desk awards, including one for Golda’s Balcony, the longest-running one-woman show in Broadway history. Feldshuh has performed Golda’s Balcony in Los Angeles, San Francisco, London, and Atlanta; at San Diego’s Old Globe, where she was honored the Theatre Critics Circle Award for Outstanding Performance; and at Washington D.C.’s Theater J, where she won the Helen Hayes Award for Best Actress. She has also received two Emmy Award nominations, and appeared in such films as A Walk on the Moon, She's Funny That Way, and Kissing Jessica Stein. More recently, she has become widely known for her role as Deanna Monroe on The Walking Dead, and currently appears on Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. 

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).

This program has been funded by a donation from Lorraine and Martin Beitler who gifted Andy Warhol’s Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century to the Jewish Museum in 2006. 

Tickets: $24 General; $18 Students and Seniors; $14 Members


Lecture: Pierre Chareau’s Maison de Verre
Thursday, November 17, 6:30pm
The Saul and Harriet M. Rothkopf Media Program
Kenneth Frampton, The Ware Professor of Architecture, Columbia University, Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, gives insight into the Maison de Verre, Pierre Chareau's signature building in Paris.

Kenneth Frampton has taught at Columbia GSAPP since 1972. He was trained as an architect at the Architectural Association School of Architecture, London and has worked as an architect and as an architectural historian and critic. In addition to Columbia, Frampton has taught at a number of leading institutions including the Royal College of Art in London, the ETH in Zurich, the Berlage Institute in Amsterdam, EPFL in Lausanne and the Accademia di Architettura in Mendrisio. Frampton is the author of Modern Architecture and the Critical Present (1980), Studies in Tectonic Culture (1995), American Masterworks (1995), Le Corbusier (2001), Labour, Work & Architecture (2005), and most recently, L’Altro Movimento Moderno (2015) and A Genealogy of Modern Architecture: Comparative Critical Analysis of Built Form (2015). He is currently at work on an expanded fifth edition of Modern Architecture: A Critical History. 

The Jewish Museum is presenting the first U.S. exhibition focused on French designer and architect Pierre Chareau (1883-1950) from November 4, 2016 through March 26, 2017.  Showcasing rare furniture, lighting fixtures, and interiors, as well as designs for the extraordinary Maison de Verre, the glass house completed in Paris in 1932, Pierre Chareau: Modern Architecture and Design will bring together over 180 rarely-seen works from major public and private collections in Europe and the United States. It will also address Chareau’s life and work in the New York area, after he left Paris during the German occupation of the city, including the house he designed for Robert Motherwell in 1947 in East Hampton, Long Island. In his day Chareau was celebrated as a designer of exquisite furniture and stylish interiors, which he displayed at the annual salons of decorative art. Both facets of his creative life are part of a single vision explored in the exhibition.

This program has been funded by a generous donation endowment from the Saul and Harriet M. Rothkopf Family Foundation.

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


Lecture: From Ingres to Warhol: Jewish Patrons and the Paradox of Portraiture
Tuesday, November 29, 11:30 am
Norman L. Kleeblatt, Susan and Elihu Rose Chief Curator speaks about the legacy of Jewish patronage in portraits from Renoir and Klimt to Picasso and Warhol, in conjunction with the exhibition John Singer Sargent’s Mrs. Carl Meyer and Her Children.

Over the past twenty-five years, Norman Kleeblatt has played a key role in shaping the holdings of the Jewish Museum, acquiring unique, culturally relevant works in various media for the collection of modern and contemporary art. Kleeblatt is known for his broad ranging exhibitions including the 2008 award-winning Action/Abstraction: Pollock, De Kooning, and American Art, 1940 – 1976 (2008). Among other exhibitions organized by Mr. Kleeblatt are The Dreyfus Affair: Art, Truth and Justice (1987) and Too Jewish? Challenging Traditional Identities (1996). He was also co-curator for An Expressionist in Paris: The Paintings of Chaim Soutine (1998) and Painting a Place in America: Jewish Artists in New York, 1900 – 1945 (1991). He currently serves on the boards of both the Vera List Center for Art and Politics of the New School and as Vice President of the U.S. section of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA).

Few paintings by John Singer Sargent better exemplify his artistic prowess as a portraitist than Mrs. Carl Meyer and her Children. Seductive and revealing, this bravura painting captures the world of a privileged English family of Jewish origin during the late Victorian era, depicting Adèle Meyer, a wealthy British philanthropist, well-known society hostess, and political activist, with her children, Elsie Charlotte and Frank Cecil. John Singer Sargent's Mrs. Carl Meyer and Her Children, on view at the Jewish Museum through February 5, 2017, is highlighting this remarkable portrait - contextualizing it with other family portraits, ephemera, documents, personal correspondence, and caricatures. On loan from the Tate Britain, it has been over ten years since the painting was on view in the United States.

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


Gallery Talks
Fridays, November 4, 11 and 18, 2pm
45-minute gallery discussions on specific themes and topics in current exhibitions, led by members of the Education Department.

Friday, November 4
Take Me (I'm Yours): Touch, Taste, Talk: Art for the Body
Led by Nelly Silagy Benedek, Director of Education

Friday, November 11
John Singer Sargent: Mrs. Carl Meyer and Her Children
Led by Jenna Weiss, Manager of Public Programs

Friday, November 18
Pierre Chareau: Interior Innovations
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.