Thursday, May 7, 2020
5 – 6 pm
Instagram Live: @thejewishmuseum

The Jewish Museum invites you to L’Chaim!, a conversation with Beatriz Milhazes and Kelly Taxter, Barnett and Annalee Newman Curator of Contemporary Art, live on @thejewishmuseum Instagram.

L'Chaim! is inspired by a series of exhibitions of commissioned artwork for the Jewish Museum lobby. Inaugurated in 2012 with an installation by Lawrence Weiner, a diverse group of artists including Beatriz Milhazes in 2016, with her installation Gamboa II,  presented their work in our most public-facing space. The artists’ projects greeted visitors upon first entering our doors, and were visible from both inside and outside the Museum, whether we were open or closed. We invite you to join us for a drink and a conversation, to connect with the artists who have exhibited in our lobby and special exhibitions, and who have brought meaning and life to the Jewish Museum.

Beatriz Milhazes’ work bursts with a chromatic and freeing vitality. Renowned for her visual language rooted in painting, collage, and printmaking, she draws on her native Rio de Janeiro. Her use of color and geometry is mined from place—the botanical gardens and the Tijuca forest near her studio, the surrounding city, its ocean front, and the cultural motifs of Brazil—and from memory. This process culminates in the artist’s patented form of abstraction, which she has termed “chromatic free geometry.” In the 1980s, she headed a new generation of artists—Geração 80 or 80s Generation—that embraced painting over the conceptual practices of the 1970s. Marked by the seminal exhibition Como vai você geração 80? (How Are You 80s Generation?) in 1984, this return to painting saw a freedom in process, in the studio as a space for action, and in a rich and amalgamated form of Brazilian art making influenced by European Modernism, the Baroque, and the Antropofagia of the late-1920s.

In collaboration with @pacegallery