The Jewish Museum is open 11 am - 4 pm. Please review visitor policies.
The Jewish Museum is open 11 am - 4 pm. Please review visitor policies.
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In June 2023, I will step down from my role as Helen Goldsmith Menschel Director of the Jewish Museum. It has been an honor to serve this historic institution for the last 11 years. I’d like to take an opportunity in these next few newsletters to look at some of the key areas that are top-of-mind for me before I leave—looking at where we have been, where we are, and where we may be going.
Earlier this year, the Jewish Museum organized Beauty and Ritual: Judaica from the Jewish Museum, New York for exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, one of the country’s leading art museums. The first in a series of Judaica shows we are doing there, the exhibition attracted a highly diverse audience of 40,000 visitors over two months and generated significant enthusiasm from Houston’s Jewish community.
Coming back from the exhibition’s closing dinner, I realized Judaica is having a moment. Interest in Judaica has soared. Museums are spotlighting Judaica not just for its decorative arts and storytelling qualities, but as part of their own focus on diversity and inclusion. Exhibiting and collecting Judaica is a way for them to connect more deeply with their local Jewish communities.
When a Trustee recently asked me about The Met and its Judaica collection, she wondered if it was creating competition for the Jewish Museum. My answer is that competition is both flattering and good—and increases audience demand for seeing this work. The Jewish Museum is, and always has been, a leader in this area, starting more than a century ago with the vision of Judge Sulzberger. Our Judaica collection is widely as regarded as the best in the country and one of the Top 2 in the world, with its sheer size (16,000 objects), remarkable breadth (encyclopedic), and unmatched quality (some of the field’s true “Mona Lisas”). Open a catalogue from a major auction house and, if there is a major piece of Judaica up for sale, the benchmark object will likely be a work from our collection.
Over the past 10 years, we have further influenced the field in the way we have organized, displayed, and commissioned Judaica. Exhibitions ranging from the extravagance of the Bodleian Library’s medieval manuscripts to Kehinde Wiley’s portraiture place contemporary art alongside Judaica of many periods to tell different stories. For example, in Wiley’s portrait of Alios Itzhak, a young Ethiopian-Israeli Jew, he adapted a 19th c. Ukrainian mizrah from the Jewish Museum’s collection as the background for the figure. This mizrah, along with many other articles of Judaica, were included in the stunning exhibition.
Other exhibitions that integrate modern and contemporary art with our Judaica collection have included the unique collaboration with artist Barbara Bloom in As it were ... So to speak: A Museum Collection in Dialogue with Barbara Bloom (2013), Repetition and Difference (2015), Afterlives:Recovering the Lost Stories of Looted Art (2021), and The Sassoons, which will open in 2023.
Where do we go from here? The strength of our collection is in Ashkenazic works, consistent with the pattern of Jewish immigration to the US. But we are quickly filling the gaps to prioritize diversity and our global reach with works from around the world, most recently including South and Southeast Asia. With our peers, we have actualized and will continue to explore great partnerships with important museums, such as the MFA, to organize and tour shows, extend our visibility, and collaborate on joint acquisitions. Stay tuned.
With warm regards,
Claudia Gould, Helen Goldsmith Menschel Director
New York: 1962-1964 explores a pivotal three-year period in the history of art and culture in New York City, examining how artists living and working in New York responded to their rapidly changing world, through more than 180 works of art—all made or seen in New York between 1962 - 1964.
On view this fall in Scenes from the Collection, Artists on Artists brings together a selection of portraits from the Jewish Museum’s collection. By exploring artists’ portrayals of other artists—and themselves—Artists on Artists offers a historical view of Jewish identities in all their many facets: religion and secularity, ethnicity and universality, fantasy and materiality, otherness and self-assertion.
New York: 1962-1964 uses the Jewish Museum’s influential role in the early 1960s New York art scene as a jumping-off point to examine how artists living and working in New York City responded to the events that marked this moment in time. Many of the artists with works on view in this exhibition share a historic institutional tie to the Museum, including Robert Rauschenberg. The artist received his first solo museum exhibition at the Jewish Museum in 1963.
Learn more about that exhibition in this excerpt from the catalogue that accompanies New York: 1962–1964.
Robert Rauschenberg rose to art-world prominence during the 1950s and early 1960s, making a series of bold gestures that demonstrated a protean approach to art making. When his self-titled retrospective opened at the Jewish Museum in 1963, it confirmed the thirty-eight-year-old’s status as one of the most important artists in the United States. It also marked the beginning of the Jewish Museum’s contemporary-art program, initiated by its visionary new director, the critic, art historian, and curator Alan Solomon.
Most of the fifty-five works in the exhibition were dense and unruly assemblages of found materials overlaid with expressive strokes of paint that Rauschenberg called Combines, which juxtaposed all manner of items, from torn scraps of newspaper to abandoned automobile tires to chipped Coca-Cola bottles. In his catalogue essay, Solomon notes that, unlike many European artists, especially those associated with Dada, who had cultivated a “negative attitude” toward society, Rauschenberg and his American cohort were “wholly engaged in life and art, in a direct and optimistic way.” The Combines exemplify this verve. Instead of resisting their environment, they collaborate with it, producing new meaning from common objects. Rauschenberg encouraged a kind of urban literacy, inviting viewers to uncover unexpected connections and understandings in the anomalous assortments of trash attached to each canvas. Although familiar, the fragments Rauschenberg used could not always be easily identified under layers of grime. These markings confirmed that the works’ components belonged to the real world while suppressing their original connotations, promoting what Solomon called “ambiguities of reading,” a semiotic irresolution that allowed the process of creating meaning to go on indefinitely.
Read more in the Jewish Museum's Medium Stories
Edited excerpt of the essay “Rauschenberg Retrospective Opens” by Sam Sackeroff from the catalogue New York: 1962–1964. The catalogue was edited by Germano Celant, designed by 2x4, and co-published by the Jewish Museum and Skira Editore. Available for purchase here.
Broadening and enriching the collection with new acquisitions of art—including paintings, sculpture, photography, and Judaica—is at the core of the Jewish Museum’s mission. The Museum was founded with a gift of ceremonial art from Mayer Sulzberger to the Jewish Theological Seminary in 1904. The Museum’s collection now spans 4,000 years of art and Jewish culture through nearly 30,000 objects from around the world, from ancient artifacts to cutting-edge contemporary art. Opening in March, After “The Wild”: Contemporary Art from the Barnett and Annalee Newman Foundation Collection will highlight selections from a particularly significant gift received by the Museum in 2018. Spanning the 1960s to the present and incorporating works in a wide range of media and artistic styles, the exhibition will pay homage to the fearless individualism and profound dedication to art that characterize Barnett and Annalee Newman’s shared legacy.
Fred Tomaselli is best known for works that combine bold graphic forms with detritus from nature, mass media, and popular culture: prescription drugs, butterfly wings, and, as in this composition, fragments of magazines and newspapers. Tomaselli uses resin and other binding agents to create layers of images, which appear embedded in the surface of the work. By allowing the noise of the world to penetrate the walls of his studio, Tomaselli cuts against abstraction’s putative universality, asserting its origin in particular—and fleeting—spaces and times.
Mark Bradford characterizes his work as “social abstraction:" though rooted in the formal languages of twentieth century modernism, it addresses political, economic, and environmental issues, particularly those that impact marginalized people. Bradford’s lineage also includes the European Affichistes of the 1950s: sourcing physical and symbolic objects from the urban environment, he mimics the weathered overlays of signage to suggest public spaces as palimpsests of meaning. Black Dot draws on fliers that proliferate in low-income neighborhoods when the real estate market sinks. Aiming to take advantage of people in difficult circumstances, they promise “sexy cash” to those willing to sell their homes to developers.
FIGURE 6 is magisterial in scale and affect; like much of Lynda Benglis’s work, however, it is made of humble materials. Benglis achieved international renown in the 1960s with her poured latex sculptures. FIGURE 6 is made of cast aluminum, but its teeming texture and undulating form were achieved with hardware store staples: chicken wire and spray foam. For Benglis, the surface of this work also recalls the crenellations of brain coral, or the towering mounds of mud pellets left by burrowing crawfish in her native Louisiana.
Beginning in the 1960s, Keith Sonnier was one of a small handful of artists who began to use neon tubing as a sculptural medium. In this work, Sonnier’s affinity for early modernists such as Piet Mondrian is perceptible: at the same time, Sonnier was deeply interested in the viewer’s bodily relationship to the work as a “drawing in space,” as well as in the psychological impact of various colors and kinds of light. In this work, fabricated in 2003 based on drawings from 1969, the industrial quality of the materials with their visible utilitarian joins is coupled with the sumptuousness of the brilliantly colored incandescent light.
This season, the Jewish Museum presents a range of programs for both in-person and virtual participants. From YouTube Premieres featuring artists, curators, and historians discussing themes in New York: 1962-1964 to a unique choreographer-taught movement class for non-dancers and dancers alike, Talks & Performances at the Jewish Museum offers members the opportunity to engage more deeply with the exhibitions and works on view.
When Alan Solomon became Director of the Jewish Museum in July 1962, he began organizing an ambitious series of exhibitions dedicated to what he called the “new art.” Solomon used the term to describe a generation of artists who shared “an intense passion for direct experience, for unqualified participation in the richness of our immediate world.”
In this talk, Sam Sackeroff, part of the curatorial team behind the Museum’s current exhibition New York: 1962-1964, will consider one aspect of the new art: its relationship to language. Taking a cue from Solomon’s own writing and that of his peers, which was filled with linguistic metaphors, Sackeroff will examine how artists and critics of the period appealed to different ideas about language in an effort to become more conversant with their surroundings, developing new kinds of fluency that had radical and far-reaching implications for how they understood themselves, their work, and their place in American society.
YouTube Premiere Thursday, October 27, 6:30 pm EDT
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Learn more about Donald Judd’s legacy as an art critic in New York City during the early 1960s and reflect on how art criticism has changed relative to culture at large. This conversation features Flavin Judd, Artistic Director, Judd Foundation, and writers and critics Johanna Fateman and Wayne Koestenbaum, and is moderated by Sarah C Bancroft, Executive Director of the Rosenquist Foundation. The speakers will illuminate connections between artists represented in the Museum’s current exhibition New York: 1962-1964 and Judd's work as a critic, especially his writing about the artists Lee Bontecou, Sally Hazelet Drummond, Yayoi Kusama, Claes Oldenburg, James Rosenquist, and Frank Stella. Additionally, Fateman and Koestenbaum will discuss the state of art criticism and the nature of their work in this field.
YouTube Premiere Thursday, Nov 3, 6:30 pm EDT
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Join us for an in-person conversation between artist Martha Edelheit and Associate Curator Rebecca Shaykin. Edelheit (b. 1931, New York City, now based in Sweden) is known as a pioneering feminist artist whose decades-long career has resulted in one of the most probing investigations into the subject of the female body, from early works exploring the expressive power of tattoos to erotic watercolors and strikingly vivid depictions of women at various stages of their lives. Her 1962 work Tattooed Lady, created just blocks from the Jewish Museum, is included in the exhibition New York: 1962-1964 and will serve as the jumping off point for a discussion that will touch on the life, work, and unique vision of this artist.
In Person, Scheuer Auditorium; Thursday, Nov 17, 6:30 pm EST
$12 Members; $22 General
TICKETS
In this afternoon workshop taught by choreographer Phoebe Berglund, learn about and experience a range of American dance techniques that were pioneered by artists during the 1960s. Drawing inspiration from dance performances and other works on view in the exhibition New York: 1962-1964, this class will provide deeper exploration of movement practices from this time period. Focusing on authentic movement as well as graphic and written dance scores, participants will create their own scores along with original drawings and writing.
Open to all skill levels; no dance experience required. Note that comfortable shoes and clothing are recommended. Masks will be required during the workshop. For up-to-date protocols and guidelines, you may check our visitor policies page.
In Person, Scheuer Auditorium; Sunday, Nov 13, 1:30 - 5:30 pm EST
$42 Members; $50 General
TICKETS
View our calendar of upcoming Talks, Performances, and Classes
Rock out with the whole family at the Jewish Museum! This fall season, the in-person family concert series has come back to the Museum with monthly concerts of award-winning performers for children and their families to enjoy together. These monthly offerings showcase a notable children's musician, and after the concert, families may head to the art studio for a hands-on, drop-in workshop inspired by works on view in the galleries. While at the Museum, pick up Kids Gallery Guides for New York: 1962-1964 and Scenes from the Collection and enjoy audio guide content, available through Bloomberg Connects, to explore exhibitions as a family through sketching and movement activities.
Grammy-nominated musician, recording artist, and composer Divinity Roxx combines virtuosic bass playing with an eclectic mash-up of hip-hop, rock, and funk that she calls "Alternative Soul." She has toured and performed with Beyoncé as her bassist and musical director and formed a newer production company, Divi Roxx Kids, which is dedicated to enriching the lives of children and young adults through inspiring, empowering and entertaining music and media that educate and guide them to be the best versions of themselves. After the concert, head to the 4th floor studio to enjoy the Museum's free monthly Drop-in Art Workshop for families.
In-Person, Scheuer Auditorium; Sunday, Nov 13, 10:30 EST
$14 Members; $18 General. Children 18 and under are free. Ticket reservations are required for both adults and children to reserve seats.
For information about family programs including concerts, drop-in workshops, and virtual events, visit TheJewishMuseum.org/Families
View our calendar of upcoming Family Programs
The Jewish Museum is housed in the historic Warburg Mansion. Built in 1908 and designed in the French Gothic chateau style, the landmark building served as the private home of Felix and Frieda Schiff Warburg for many years. In 1944, Frieda Warburg made a generous and transformative commitment to the arts when she donated the Mansion to become a museum of art and Jewish culture.
The Warburgs were ardent philanthropists and proponents of the arts. To honor their family tradition of giving, the Jewish Museum has created the Warburg Society—a special group of vital supporters who provide for the institution’s future by incorporating it into their legacy through a planned gift or bequest. Warburg Society members have a profound impact on the Jewish Museum’s compelling exhibitions and unparalleled educational programs.
To learn more about the Warburg Society, or to plan a personal consultation, kindly contact Ella Parker, Development Associate, at 212.423.3347 or via email at eparker@thejm.org.
Take advantage of your member discount and own New York: 1962-1964, the exhibition catalogue that charts three momentous years during which New York became the global capital of art. Modeled on the scale and format of Life magazine (one of the most widely read publications of the era), this lavishly illustrated oversized paperback was conceived by the world-renowned curator, art historian, and critic Germano Celant (1940 - 2020), and traces a detailed itinerary of artists and curators, experimental exhibitions and museums, as well as historical and political events that transformed society during this explosive moment.
Price: $64
Members: $58.50
