New York, NY, September 24, 2020 —The Jewish Museum is presenting We Fight to Build a Free World: An Exhibition by Jonathan Horowitz upon reopening to the public on Thursday, October 1, 2020. Originally scheduled to open in March 2020, We Fight to Build a Free World is an exhibition curated by Jonathan Horowitz, a New York-based artist who for three decades has made work that engages critically with politics and culture. Under his direction, the exhibition looks at how artists have historically responded to the rise of authoritarianism and xenophobia as well as racism, anti-Semitism, and other forms of bigotry. On view through January 24, 2021, the exhibition also addresses issues surrounding immigration, assimilation, and cultural identity. Admission is free through December 31, 2020; timed tickets required. 

The Jewish Museum will present We Fight to Build a Free World: An Exhibition by Jonathan Horowitz which looks at how artists have responded to the rise of intolerance and authoritarianism, addressing issues surrounding immigration, assimilation, and cultural identity.

The Jewish Museum will present Modern Look: Photography and the American Magazine, an exhibition exploring how photography, graphic design, and popular magazines converged to transform American visual culture from 1930 to 1960.

The Jewish Museum and Film at Lincoln Center will present the 29th annual New York Jewish Film Festival (NYJFF), January 15–28, 2020. Among the oldest and most influential Jewish film festivals worldwide, NYJFF each year presents the finest documentary, narrative, and short films from around the world that explore the Jewish experience. Featuring new work by dynamic voices in international cinema as well as film revivals, the festival’s 2020 lineup includes 30 wide-ranging and exciting features and shorts from the iconic to the iconoclastic, many of which will be screening in their world, U.S., and New York premieres.

The Jewish Museum will present Signs and Symbols: The Zodiac, featuring works from the Museum’s collection that depict the astrological signs. Jewish communities, adapting and adopting local practices over the centuries, incorporated these symbols into ceremonial objects, synagogue architecture, and art even though rabbinic authorities reject astrology as part of Jewish practice.

The Jewish Museum will present Rachel Feinstein: Maiden, Mother, Crone, the first survey of the New York-based artist in the United States, from November 1, 2019 through January 3, 2021. The exhibition includes three decades of Feinstein’s work in sculpture, painting, and video, as well as a panoramic wallpaper, a major new commission, and the artist’s maquettes for sculpture. Taken together, the works emphasize the artist’s fascination with dualities: her investigations of masculinity and femininity or good and evil echo her formal explorations of balance and precariousness or positive and negative space. Feinstein’s art follows myriad lines of inquiry, but the idea of the feminine is central. She has made a sustained examination of the many ways this concept is manifested culturally. Female protagonists and figures proliferate in her work and bind it together across diverse media.

The Jewish Museum will present Edith Halpert and the Rise of American Art, the first exhibition to explore the remarkable career of Edith Gregor Halpert (1900-1970), the influential American art dealer and founder of the Downtown Gallery in New York City. A pioneer in the field and one of New York’s first female art dealers, Halpert propelled American art to the fore at a time when the European avant-garde still enthralled the world. The artists she supported — Stuart Davis, Jacob Lawrence, Georgia O'Keeffe, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Ben Shahn, and Charles Sheeler key among them — became icons of American modernism. Halpert also brought vital attention to overlooked nineteenth-century American artists, such as William Michael Harnett, Edward Hicks, and Raphaelle Peale, as well as little-known and anonymous folk artists. With her revolutionary program at the Downtown Gallery, her endless energy, and her extraordinary business acumen, Halpert inspired generations of Americans to value the art of their own country, in their own time.

The Jewish Museum will present Masterpieces and Curiosities: The Benguiat Collection, featuring over 30 works from the Museum’s H. Ephraim and Mordecai Benguiat Family Collection. This collection of 300 examples of decorative and ceremonial art related to Jewish culture is one of the formative groups of the Jewish Museum’s collection. The exhibition includes objects ranging from a newly restored Torah ark curtain from Istanbul (ca. 1735) to an ornately embroidered silk eighteenth-century pillowcase for the Passover Seder from Bulgaria.

The Jewish Museum presents Personas: George Segal’s Abraham and Isaac, an installation of the life-sized plaster sculpture by American artist George Segal (American, 1924–2000), being shown at the Museum for the first time. The artist adapted the biblical story of Abraham, who was commanded to sacrifice his son Isaac as proof of his obedience and faith in God, as an allegory for the 1970 tragedy at Kent State University in Ohio. During the incident, National Guardsmen, who were ordered to control an escalated anti-Vietnam protest, shot and killed four students, wounding nine others. 

The Jewish Museum will present Television and Beyond: Workplace Encounters, featuring a selection of television clips exploring interactions in the workplace from classics such as The West Wing and contemporary programs like Atlanta and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. One of seven sections that make up the Jewish Museum’s third floor collection exhibition, Scenes from the Collection, “Television and Beyond” draws inspiration from the Museum’s National Jewish Archive of Broadcasting.

The Jewish Museum will present Rachel Feinstein: Maiden, Mother, Crone, the first survey of the New York-based artist in the United States, from November 1, 2019 through March 22, 2020. Three decades of Feinstein’s work in sculpture, installation, painting, drawing, and video, as well as a newly commissioned wall-relief, a panoramic wallpaper, and the artist’s sculptural maquettes will be brought together to emphasize her fascination with the dualistic nature of cultural expression and everyday life, how fundamental yet oppositional concepts coexist and are ceaselessly negotiated in art and the construction of identity. From Feinstein’s earliest to her most recent works, female figures and protagonists dominate — a distinguishing feature of both the artist’s practice and this exhibition. Feinstein probes how notions of “the feminine” manifest in the popular imagination, an investigation that pulses through and binds together Maiden, Mother, Crone.

The Jewish Museum presents The Gift: Works from the Barnett and Annalee Newman Foundation Collection, the first in a series of exhibitions drawn from the Foundation’s donation of artworks to the Jewish Museum.