Search
‘Brooklyn Shtetl’ Opens at the Hadas Gallery
15 May2011
By Joshua Stulman
Hadas Gallery is proud to present the recent paintings by emerging artist, Ali Spechler.
Move over Marc Chagall, this isn’t Jewish shtetl life! “Brooklyn Shtetl†is a series of contemporary Jewish portraiture by painter Ali Spechler. Her informal paintings underline the complexity and variety of how “Jewishness†is expressed in our modern time.
Eric by Ali Spechler
Spechler’s portraits beam with personality. Her emphasis on character reveals the individual quirks of her subjects. In Ariella and Simcha, she portrays a rabbi distracted by his busy schedule and obligations as he poses with his pregnant wife. A twist on the Van Eyck classic, Arnolfini Wedding Portrait, both husband and wife are independent, strong leaders. Gigi with Tefillin captures a moment of silent devotion of a young Israeli before leaving for the army.
Read the rest of this entry »
- In: Exhibition Reviews
- Tags: NYC, Painting
Traveling exhibition and online store of affordable art and art objects
Call for Entries and Hosts
Combining High-Brow and Low-Brow art, Jewish Art Now presents a pop-up shop and affordable-art gallery to showcase punchy visual culture with a Hebraic twist. Jewish Art Now will be popping up the shop in various locations around New York with an accompanying online store.
Call for Artists:
Small works and art objects for traveling shop (various locations) and online store.
This can include 2D/3D works, prints, fine art toys, flipbooks, stickers, stencils, et. Artists are encouraged to create new works affordably priced and made to sell that play between fine art and original consumer art. Innovative Jewish subject matter/influence encouraged.
Pricing:
Artwork must be priced under $500.
Commissions:
Artwork sold will be taking a 35% commission. Please keep this in mind for pricing your work.
Submissions are currently accepted on a rolling basis. If you would like your work to be included in our premiere launch please respond by May 31, 2011.
Email jpg entries with descriptions to submissions@jewishartnow.com with “Pop-up Shop” in the subject line. Please note if you would like the artworks to be available in store or online only.
Submissions will be selected by a highly vetting curatorial process, lead by Elke Reva Sudin.
Exceptional works are open for consideration to be published in Jewish Art Now the printed book.
Call for Hosts:
New York City organizations, institutions, businesses, vacant spaces, etc are invited to host the Popshop for events or temporary periods of time beginning June 2011.
If you would like to host the shop, become a partner or sponsor, contact submissions@jewishartnow.com
- In: Call for Entries
Grants for Jewish Documentary Film
12 May2011
Lynn and Jules Kroll Fund for Jewish Documentary Film
2011 Film Fund Application
The 2011 Film Fund application is now live. View the 2011 guidelines here, and apply here.
The application is due in its entirety, including all uploaded work samples, by 12:00 midnight on July 22nd.
Email us with any questions, and best of luck!
The 2010 Film Fund Grantees
Four of our 2010 Film Fund Grantees
The Foundation for Jewish Culture granted $140,000 to five exemplary documentaries, ensuring their delivery to film festivals, television, and other distribution outlets. The grants, which range between $20,000 and $35,000 each, will enable filmmakers to pay license fees for archival footage, complete additional shooting, and reach a wider audience through outreach and engagement strategies.
Read the rest of this entry »
The opening gala of the Israel Film Festival (IFF) was held at the Plaza Hotel in New York City in a traditional Hollywood manner with red carpet, cocktails and posh Michal Negrin jewelry gift bags, but it was nonetheless setting up a festival that looks to break old stereotypes and present new takes on the Israeli experience.
2011 IFF Cinematic Achievement Award recipient Micha Shagrir and festival founder Meir Fenigstein. Photo by Saul Sudin.
“While Israeli movies used to focus on heavy political and social problems, the young generation of movie makers are focused on the art of creating more in-depth characters and real drama,†said Adam Sanderson, co-director of “This is Sodomâ€, the most popular movie in Israel’s history with 600,000 viewers within a year. He is a leading figure of the young generation of directors who are not intimidated to give a new, cooler spin on Israeli cinema.
Micha Shagrir, the veteran Producer and Director who was there to be presented with the 2011 IFF Cinematic Achievement Award, commented, “When we came to this industry we felt obliged to say important things about our great nation. Today Israelis’ lives are so hard and they see so much aggravating news on television all the time; when they go out to the movies, they want to see something lighter.â€
Sanderson’s cast and crew started out making “Eretz Nehederet†(“Wonderful Country”, a Saturday Night Live-esque Israeli television show) before branching out to the big screen. “This is Sodom†addresses a biblical, somewhat sacrilegious topic, much like Britain’s Monty Python did with “Life of Brian†before them, making light of the last week of Sodom before its destruction. “I don’t think art should be obliged to anything, otherwise it becomes propaganda, like the army films of the sixties,†Sanderson said, and then added, “Our movie is really out there.†Read the rest of this entry »
Zeek Launch Event
Thursday May 12th 7pm
Live Music/Food and Drink
Featuring: Ruth Weisberg, Stacie Chalken, Boris Dralyuk, Dan Katzir, and Racelle Rosett
BLYTHE PROJECT
5797 W. Washington BLVD Culver City
Los Angelos, CA
RSVP: Amhromadka@msn.com
Read the rest of this entry »
- Read More
- Comments Off on ZEEK Spring Launch with Jewish Artist Initiative and Jewlicious
Gallery hours: visit  http://www.charteroakcenter.org/index.php/gallery
Ex-Haredi Artists Grapple With Their Pasts
3 May2011
By Shulem Deen for the Arty Semite
A photo of a woman wrapped in phylacteries might not seem very bold after Leonard Nimoy’s “Shekhina†project. But to many of the artists at the opening of a new art exhibit called “All in the Eye,†a photograph of a woman adorned with tallit and tefillin, eye to the camera with a slight smile, represents the height of sacrilege.
The woman in the photo is ex-Hasidic, as is the artist who took it. Both hail from a culture in which the act is still shocking and offensive: a woman entering a man’s domain in search of spiritual fulfillment. The portrait, of course, is powerful both for its rejection of traditional values and the re-appropriation of its ritual objects — especially given its personal context. But it’s the playful, slightly mischievous smile that is most captivating. It is as if both subject and artist, still, after many years, delight in the act of ritual subversion.
A similar subtext is present in several of the pieces in “All in the Eye.†The show is presented by Footsteps, a Manhattan organization that assists formerly Hasidic and Haredi individuals to explore possibilities beyond their communities. According to Michael Jenkins, Footsteps’ Director of Programs, the organization has been encouraging members to use art in their journeys away from a circumscribed life of piety and restrictions towards one of individual choice and expression.
Read the rest of this entry »
- In: Exhibition Reviews
- Tags: Hassidic, Mixed Media, NYC
JTS Exhibits Artists in Residence
2 May2011
By SUDINmag
The Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS) presents Volumes II, an exhibition by JTS artists in residence that is now open at the JTS library in New York.
From books to fabric sculptures, graphic novel illustrations, and cereal box aprons (!?), this second exhibition of work by JTS artists in residence is as diverse as the JTS library itself. Advisor Tobi Kahn was delighted by the results exclaiming, “Each artist is doing work that is based on their lives and creating their own iconography.†Kahn explained that the artists in residence work as a community within the collaborative setting of an atelier studio. Members include faculty, staff, students, and alumni of all the JTS programs.
Read the rest of this entry »
By Ezra Glinter and Nate Lavey originally published on The Arty Semite
Photo by Ahron D. Weiner
In 2004, photographer Ahron D. Weiner took his first trip to the gravesite of Rabbi Nachman of Breslov in Uman, Ukraine. Before his death in 1810, Nachman is said to have promised that if his followers came to his grave on Rosh Hashanah, he would intercede on their behalf in heaven, even “pulling them out of hell by their peyes.†In recent years Uman has become the largest Jewish pilgrimage site outside of Israel, drawing tens of thousands of visitors each year, a scene Weiner describes as “Mt. Sinai meets Woodstock.†For six years Weiner returned to Uman for Rosh Hashanah, taking thousands of photographs. In the video below, Weiner describes his experiences in Uman, interacting with and taking pictures of the pilgrims who flock there. An exhibit of these photos titled “Next Year in Uman: A Journey to the Ukraine†is currently on display at the Philadelphia Museum of Jewish Art.
Watch a video of ‘Next Year in Uman’:
Next Year in Uman: A Journey to Ukraine from Jewish Forward on Vimeo.
Read more:Â http://blogs.forward.com/the-arty-semite/137346/#ixzz1L4y1s9YA
- In: Exhibition Reviews
- Tags: Philadelphia, Photography, Videos
When Gershuni Paints there is a God
28 Apr2011
By David Sperber
Translated from the Hebrew by Elisheva Sperber
It would not be an exaggeration to say that the retrospective exhibition of Moshe Gershuni, displayed at the Tel-Aviv Museum of Art, is one of the museum’s most important exhibitions as of late.
Gershuni became a groundbreaker since the days of political and conceptual art, of which he was one of the originators in Israel. After working with expressions of explicit carnality and unequivocal expressionism, and what is refered to at times as †Abject Art “, which is expressed by him in images and materials insinuating bodily excretions, continued on the theme of “The Return to the Shtetl†and the occupation with the Holocaust and Yiddish, accompanied by criticism towards the Zionistic aversion to the “Jew of the exile†image. The exhibition’s curator notes in the catalogue that Gershuni celebrates in all that the Zionist thinker Max Nordau, and later on the Nazis, entitled “distortedâ€, i.e. Jewishness, queerness, crime and retardation. Gershuni anticipated the revival of Judaism in Israeli art, alongside the occupation with queer and gender issues.
The religious aspect in general, and the Jewish one in particular, became dominant in Gershuni’s work starting in the 80′s. They recall of the Pauline concept of “carnal Israelâ€, and reveal a sensual creator, who voices primarily the corporeal, furnishing it with ideas. Gershuni’s appeal to the transcendental is written with bodily fluids; Gershuni’s transcendentalism is buried in physical material and mundane matter. Gershuni underscores the fact that a condition for the dialogue he creates is to “accept beauty without disregarding shitâ€. His work is often intuitive, “gut speechâ€, in which great ideas are etched in a way no language could replace. He quotes biblical verses from memory, only to discover that his citations are erroneous or that they are misspelled , however, he does not mind, as he in this way has reinvented them. In a paraphrase on the expression “bland Jewish foodâ€, coined by the author Orly Castel-Bloom, we shall say that Gershuni’s work is indeed quite often Jewish in content; however it is replete with flavors of pathos and sensuality.
Read the full article here.
- In: Exhibition Reviews
- Tags: Drawing, Israel, Painting