Upcoming Exhibitions at the Jewish Museum

New York, NY, March 28, 2024—The Jewish Museum has announced its schedule of exhibitions through the Spring of 2025, including Jim Dine’s Hiroshima series; a concise examination of Frederick Kiesler’s experimental design practice; new work by seven emerging artists; the first U.S. museum exhibition of visual artist Ilit Azoulay; Trenton Doyle Hancock’s works presented together with those by Philip Guston; and the Book of Esther as it was depicted in the age of Rembrandt. 

Jim Dine: Hiroshima

March 29-May 27, 2024

Jim Dine’s (b. 1935) Hiroshima series (1982-83), recently acquired by the Museum for its collection, highlights the artist’s politically charged work and his endeavors to support anti-nuclear protests. The 11 works evoke the annihilation and despair unleashed by the atomic bombs the United States dropped in 1945 on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, at the end of World War II. Dine’s art is an intensely personal exploration of autobiography, often reflected upon through reoccurring, idiosyncratic motifs such as tools, hearts, robes (often considered self-portraits), trees, and a handful of other quotidian objects. The title, Hiroshima, transforms Dine’s familiar symbols into metaphors for the tragedy of weapons of mass destruction. Jim Dine: Hiroshima is the second in a series of installations that refer to the violence of war and its inevitable toll on innocents.

Frederick Kiesler: Vision Machines 

April 25, 2024 – July 28, 2024 

This exhibition is a concise yet rich examination of Frederick John Kiesler’s (1890-1965) experimental design practice through the activities of his Laboratory for Design Correlation at Columbia University from the late 1930s to the early 1940s. The output of Kiesler’s Laboratory included research, design studies, and drawings that probed the possibilities of the relationship between design, energy, and the human body. The exhibition will highlight two of Kiesler’s most essential projects developed at the Laboratory: the Mobile Home Library, a device proposed to radically alter domestic space, and the Vision Machine, an ambitious apparatus intended to visualize human sight. For the first time, Kiesler’s previously unrealized Mobile Home Library will be fabricated and presented.

Overflow, Afterglow: New Work in Chromatic Figuration 

May 24, 2024 – September 15, 2024

New works in painting, sculpture, and installation by Sula Bermúdez-Silverman (b. 1993), Sasha Gordon (b. 1998), Sara Issakharian (b. 1983), Chella Man (b. 1998), Ilana Savdie (b. 1986), Austin Martin White (b. 1984), and Rosha Yaghmai (b. 1978) use supernatural color and uncanny luminescence to evade the reductive nature of traditional figuration. Their palettes embody the lived experiences and cross-cultural allegiances of a multiethnic, multiracial, and otherwise multifaceted group of makers. Together, they push at and spill over the outermost limits of realism, highlighting the figure’s manipulability and continual metamorphosis. In turn, their practices generate space for resilient, transgressive, and exuberant bodies, vaguely discernable but unable to be placed or contained.

Ilit Azoulay: Mere Things 

September 13, 2024 – January 5, 2025 

Mere Things will be the first solo U.S. museum exhibition dedicated to the work of Ilit Azoulay (Israeli, b. 1972). Initially trained in photography, Azoulay has developed an interdisciplinary, research-based practice that explores how images and objects shape memory, produce knowledge, and support or undermine historical narratives. She deploys the disruptive strategies of photomontage—manipulating scale, perspective, and context—along with sound and sculptural elements to recast both prosaic and precious objects in new roles. The exhibition will include selections from 2011 to the present, including new work that responds specifically to the collections and context of the Jewish Museum.

Draw Them In, Paint Them Out: Trenton Doyle Hancock Confronts Philip Guston

November 8, 2024 – March 30, 2025 

This exhibition will bring together for the first time two trailblazing American artists from different generations, Trenton Doyle Hancock (b. 1974) and Philip Guston (1913-1980). A defining figure of twentieth-century avant-garde art, the Jewish painter Philip Guston addressed racism, antisemitism, and his own complicity in white supremacy through his now iconic paintings of buffoonish Klansmen. Trenton Doyle Hancock, a leading Black contemporary artist and cartoonist known for his collaged canvases, similarly draws on the language of comics to challenge and comment upon the American condition. Over the past decade, Hancock has produced a significant body of work in which Torpedoboy, his superhero avatar, confronts Guston’s hooded alter-ego. This immersive installation will explore the artists’ shared commitment to investigating the legacy of white supremacy in the United States in ways that are both emotionally raw and deeply humorous.

The Book of Esther in the Age of Rembrandt 

March 7, 2025 – August 10, 2025 

In the age of Rembrandt van Rijn (1606 – 1669), the biblical Book of Esther was a key source of inspiration for diverse communities in Holland, both Jewish and Christian. Traditionally, the Esther story is read annually on the Jewish holiday of Purim. For immigrant Jewish communities living with new freedom in more tolerant Amsterdam, celebrating Purim—notably through finely produced Esther scrolls and theater productions—became meaningful expressions of Jewish culture. For the Dutch, Queen Esther’s heroism came to represent their emerging nation’s identity. Rembrandt and his contemporaries depicted essential scenes of Esther’s story in paintings, prints, drawings, and decorative arts. This exhibition gives expression to this full range of the Book of Esther’s popularity and meaning in Rembrandt’s time. 

Dates and information are subject to change. Please check www.TheJewishMuseum.org for the most up-to-date information.