Monday, September 8, 2025
6:30 – 8 pm EDT
Scheuer Auditorium

Hear James S. Snyder, Helen Goldsmith Menschel Director, in dialogue with Jewish Museum collection artist Joel Mesler and painter Jacqueline Gourevitch. They will discuss resonances between their practices and the current exhibition Ben Shahn, On Nonconformity (on view through October 26, 2025).

About the artists:

Jacqueline Gourevitch was born in 1933 in Paris. In 1940, her family immigrated to the United States, arriving at Ellis Island. In 1950, she studied at Black Mountain College, a school with an illustrious faculty list that included Willem and Elaine de Kooning, Josef Albers, and Ben Shahn. Among the student body at the time were Robert Rauschenberg, Kenneth Noland, and Cy Twombly. In 1973, Gourevitch was included in the Whitney Biennial. In 1975, she showed at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, as part of their Matrix series. In 2015, Helen Molesworth included her work in Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933–1957 at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston.

Joel Mesler’s (b. 1974, Los Angeles) paintings shed light on universal themes by filtering them through autobiography, humor, self-deprecation, and surprising compositional juxtapositions. Childhood memories fuel meditations on design and popular iconography, not to mention the liquid, fluid, and mutable nature of the painting process. In recent years, Mesler has explored the power of acceptance, allowing emotions—as well as the cultural forms in which they become constellated—to exist at the center of his project. Mesler has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Rockefeller Center, New York (2024), Chateau La Coste, France (2024), Lévy Gorvy Dayan, New York (2024), the Long Museum West Bund, Shanghai (2023); David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles (2023); Lévy Gorvy, Hong Kong (2021); Harper’s Books, East Hampton, New York (2020); and Simon Lee, London (2018). Mesler lives and works in East Hampton, New York.

Tickets: $24 General; $16 Students and Seniors; $14 Jewish Museum members
Doors open at 6 pm; Includes Museum Admission

The Morris W. Offit Lecture Series at the Jewish Museum is made possible in part by the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Foundation.