October 2015 Programs at the Jewish Museum Feature Letty Cottin Pogrebin, Kenneth Goldsmith, A Panel on Art and Politics, and More

New York, NY - The Jewish Museum's fall 2015 slate of lectures, discussions, and events launches in October with author talks by writer and activist Letty Cottin Pogrebin and poet Kenneth Goldsmith; a panel on art and politics moderated by Nato Thompson of Creative Time and featuring artists Andrea Bowers, Sharon Hayes, and Shuddhabrata Sengupta; and a lecture on Jewish photographers by historian Deborah Dash Moore. The program series Wish You Were Here, imaginary conversations with the subjects of Warhol’s Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century (1980), will continue with a discussion between famed philosopher Martin Buber, as presented by scholar Sarah Scott, and Jens Hoffmann, The Jewish Museum's Deputy Director, Exhibitions and Public Programs.

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 – OCTOBER 2015

 

The Liberating Lens: Jewish Photographers Picture the Modern World

With Deborah Dash Moore

The James L. Weinberg Distinguished Lecture

Thursday, October 15, 6pm

In the middle decades of the 20th century, Jews turned to photography in large numbers as a way to earn a living, a means of self-expression, a form of political activism, and a mode of artistic creativity. In this lecture, Professor Deborah Dash Moore looks at the liberating power of the camera. What did Jewish Americans see when they pictured the modern world? How did photography offer them freedom? Through examples by photographers such as Nan Goldin, Garry Winogrand, and Bruce Davidson, this talk will consider the camera's appeal for so many Jews of the midcentury.

Deborah Dash Moore is Frederick G.L. Huetwell Professor of History, and Director, Frankel Center for Judaic Studies, University of Michigan. An historian of American Jews, she focuses on the twentieth century and the urban experience. She is the author of GI Jews: How World War II Changed a Generation, Gender and Jewish History (with Marion Kaplan) and American Jewish Identity Politics, and the recipient of the Jewish Cultural Achievement Award from The Foundation for Jewish Culture.

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

 

Author Talk: Letty Cottin Pogrebin

Monday, October 19, 11:30am

Author and activist Letty Cottin Pogrebin speaks about her latest novel, Single Jewish Male Seeking Soul Mate. Pogrebin’s second novel follows the left-leaning son of Holocaust survivors who promises his mother that he’ll marry a Jew. But when he falls for an African-American activist grappling with her own inherited trauma, he must reconcile the family he loves with the woman who might be his soulmate. 

A founding editor and writer for Ms. Magazine, Pogrebin is the author of eleven books, including the memoirs Getting Over Getting Older and Deborah, Golda, and Me: Being Female and Jewish in America, the novel Three Daughters, and How to Be a Friend to a Friend Who’s Sick.  Pogrebin has written for such publications as The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Nation, Harper’s Bazaar, and Travel & Leisure, and is a regular columnist for Moment magazine.

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

 

Author Talk: Kenneth Goldsmith

Tuesday, October 20, 6pm

Author and poet Kenneth Goldsmith discusses his new book Capital: New York, Capital of the 20th Century, in a conversation with Jens Hoffmann, Deputy Director, Exhibitions and Public Programs. In this book, Goldsmith collects a massive assortment of quotations about New York City in the 20th century, derived from novels, histories, newspapers, memoirs, letters, advertisements, and more unlikely sources, all organized into lyrical and philosophical categories. This kaleidoscopic montage is a literary adoration of New York as the capital of the world, and was inspired by Walter Benjamin’s unfinished masterpiece, The Arcades Project, a compendium of quotations about nineteenth-century Paris. 

Kenneth Goldsmith's writing has been called some of the most "exhaustive and beautiful collage work yet produced in poetry" by Publishers Weekly. Goldsmith is the author of eight books of poetry, founding editor of the online archive UbuWeb, and the editor of I'll Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews, which is the basis for the opera Trans-Warhol.

Free with RSVP

 

Wish You Were Here: Martin Buber

Thursday, October 22, 6:30pm

Jens Hoffmann, Deputy Director, Exhibitions and Public Programs, will speak with philosopher Martin Buber, as portrayed by portrayed by Sarah Scott, Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Co-Director, Center for Ethics, Manhattan College.  Over a period of two years, Hoffmann is interviewing the subjects of Andy Warhol's Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century (1980), interpreted by prominent experts, as if each were coming to the Museum to have a conversation in the present day.  The evening will offer an interactive component, integrating questions and comments from Twitter and other social media platforms received in advance.

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.  

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.

A native of San Francisco, Dr. Sarah Scott earned her B.A. in Art History and Modern Culture and Media from Brown University and her Ph.D. in Philosophy from the New School for Social Research. She teaches and conducts research in ethics, 19th and 20th century continental philosophy, and the history of philosophy. Forthcoming publications include studies of Martin Buber’s appropriation of Nicholas of Cusa, his concept of personhood, and his notion of grace. She is currently working on papers on the role of imagination in dialogic ethics and on the recent affirmation in the EU of a right to be forgotten, and is a faculty advisor for the Manhattan College Film Society.

Free with Pay-What-You-Wish Admission; Advance RSVP Required

 

Dialogue and Discourse: Confronting the Political

Thursday, October 29, 6:30pm

Featuring artists Andrea Bowers, Sharon Hayes, and Shuddhabrata Sengupta, this panel considers how art and politics have evolved together since the early 20th century. Moderated by Nato Thompson, Chief Curator, Creative Time.  This program is presented in conjunction with the exhibition, The Power of Pictures: Early Soviet Photography, Early Soviet Film and continues Dialogue and Discourse, a series of evening conversations inspired by current exhibitions and exploring artistic practice, global perspectives, and cultural issues.

Los Angeles multimedia artist Andrea Bowers’ work explores the intersection between activism and art. Her main focus is the necessity of nonviolent protest and civil disobedience in the lives of women. Andrea’s recent work investigates the continued exploitation of the poor and working class. Her intricate photorealist drawings, large-scale graphic works, videos and ephemera pay homage to a multitude of movements and causes particularly feminism, climate justice, immigrant rights and workers’ rights.  She is a proud member of the SEIU local 721 and currently a member of the Bargaining Committee for the Otis College of Art and Design Part-time Faculty Union. She has been teaching in the Otis Graduate Public Practice Program since 2007.

Over the past ten years, Sharon Hayes has been engaged in an art practice that uses multiple mediums - video, performance, and installation - in ongoing investigation into various intersections between history, politics and speech. Her work is concerned with developing new representational strategies that examine and interrogate the present political moment, not as a moment without historical foundation but as one that is always allegorical, a moment that reaches simultaneously backwards and forwards. To this aim, she employs conceptual and methodological approaches borrowed from artistic and academic practices such as theater, film, anthropology, linguistics, and journalism.  Hayes’ work has been shown at such museums as the New Museum for Contemporary Art, the Guggenheim Museum, P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, and the Tate Modern in London, and was included in the 2010 Whitney Biennial and the Istanbul Biennial in 2009.

Shuddhabrata Sengupta is an artist and curator with the Raqs Media Collective, in Delhi, India. Raqs Media Collective enjoys playing a plurality of roles, often appearing as artists, occasionally as curators, and sometimes as philosophical agent provocateurs. Raqs has exhibited widely, including at Documenta, and the Venice, Istanbul, Taipei, Liverpool, Shanghai, Sydney and Sao Paulo Biennales. They have had solo shows in museums, and educational and independent art spaces, in Boston, Brussels, Madrid, Delhi, Shanghai, London, New York, Toronto, among others. Works by Raqs are part of several contemporary art collections and museums, and their essays have been published in numerous anthologies. In 2000, Raqs co-founded the Sarai initiative at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies in Delhi, and the Sarai Reader Series, which they edited till 2013.  Sengupta has been named the Keith Haring Fellow in Art and Activism at the Center for Curatorial Studies and the Human Rights Program at Bard College, Annandale upon Hudson, New York, for the year 2015-2016. Sengupta also contributes as a writer to the radical South Asia based blog, Kafila.org. 

Since 2007, curator and writer Nato Thompson has organized major projects for Creative Time including the annual Creative Time Summit, Kara Walker's: A Subtlety (2014), Living as Form (2011), Paul Ramirez Jonas’s Key to the City (2010), Jeremy Deller’s It is What it is with New Museum curators Laura Hoptman and Amy Mackie (2009), Democracy in America: The National Campaign (2008), Paul Chan’s acclaimed Waiting for Godot in New Orleans (2007), and Mike Nelson’s A Psychic Vacuum with curator Peter Eleey. Previously, he worked as Curator at MASS MoCA where he completed numerous large-scale exhibitions including The Interventionists: Art in the Social Sphere (2004) with a catalogue distributed by MIT Press. He curated the exhibition for Independent Curators International titled Experimental Geography. His book Seeing Power: Socially Engaged Art in the Age of Cultural Production was published by Melville House in summer 2015.

From early vanguard constructivist works by Alexander Rodchenko and El Lissitzky, to the modernist photography 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 explores how early photo based art work defined a new Soviet style while energizing and expanding the very nature of these media, and how modernist photography, film, and poster art were harnessed to disseminate Communist ideology from the Bolshevik Revolution to the 1930s.

Free with Pay-What-You-Wish Admission; Advance RSVP Recommended

 

A Closer Look Gallery Talks

Tuesdays, October 13, 20, and 27, 2:00pm

Educators engage visitors in discussions about select works of art in The Power of Pictures: Early Soviet Photography, Early Soviet Film.

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.