Now on view: New Acquisitions from the Jewish Museum Collection
Works by Jonathan Horowitz, Louise Nevelson, Trenton Doyle Hancock, and Haim Steinbach on view in “Scenes from the Collection”
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 Jewish 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. We are excited to be highlighting several new acquisitions currently on view in Scenes from the Collection. Continue reading to learn more.
Jonathan Horowitz’s work, Power (2019), reproduces the options that appear when a smartphone user holds down the raised fist emoji. Until 2015 emojis representing people were uniformly bright yellow. Lacking resemblance to any actual skin tone, this color was — at least hypothetically — neutral. When it became possible to choose a naturalistic hue for faces and hands in digital communications, some users felt affirmed. Others, including those who were uncomfortable with slotting themselves into racial categories, did not.
Technologically mediated representations of race can be fraught in other ways, too. The fist emoji menu, for instance, seems to imply visually that calls for Black Power and calls for white power are morally equivalent. The cartoonish fists in this work also suggest that displays of interracial solidarity on social media can be superficial. By rendering these tiny everyday icons as large-scale dimensional artworks, Horowitz asks us to contemplate their greater implications and possible meanings.
Louise Nevelson was raised in a Ukrainian immigrant Jewish household in Rockland, Maine, where her father and brother both worked as woodcutters. In the 1940s she gravitated toward building wood sculptures, perhaps influenced by the family lumber business. Her large-scale assemblages, composed of discarded wood and household objects and coated in monochromatic paint, transformed the detritus she found on New York City streets into abstract monuments.
Haim Steinbach conceived of this object-based portrait of the Jewish Museum as a repository of Jewish memorial art. The artist selected and arranged six objects from the Jewish Museum collection that survived World War II in various ways. For instance, the handkerchief, which he donated to the Museum, belonged to his father and survived the Holocaust. The other objects are a wooden dreidel, a gilded Purim noisemaker, an angel figure that was originally part of a hanging lamp, a gilt-silver palm cup, and a handmade pendant.
While realizing the work Steinbach stumbled upon an arrangement of five glass bottles in an odds-and-ends shop window. He placed them on his windowsill before including them in the upper portion of this work.
In Step and Screw: The Star of Code Switching (2020), Trenton Doyle Hancock imagines a meeting between his avatar Torpedo Boy, a Black superhero, and the controversial Klansman alter ego of the Jewish painter Philip Guston. Guston portrayed himself in the late 1960s and 1970s as a buffoonish hooded figure as a way to ridicule the Klan and thereby diminish the power of its hateful symbolism. It was also an examination of his own complicity in a white-supremacist culture: Guston had changed his name from Goldstein in his youth in response to his family’s conflicts with antisemitic Klansmen. His evil alter ego reveals the artist’s conflicted attitude toward his assimilation later in life.
The Klansman in this painting hands the “star of code switching” to Hancock’s Torpedo Boy. (Code switching is the practice of shifting one’s language, appearance, or behavior to meet cultural expectations. Like assimilation, code switching can be a means of self-preservation and social advancement for oppressed groups.) As in a comic book, text embedded in the picture illuminates the conversation between and the inner monologues of the cartoon like figures. While Torpedo Boy considers the star’s dubious promise (“It will help you live longer”), the perils of code switching are already apparent: Torpedo Boy has turned a ghostly white, as if he has become a reflection of the Klansman himself.
Hancock uses irreverent humor to challenge the legacy of white supremacy in our country, just as Guston once did. As a Black man raised and living in the Southern United States, the artist used his own intergenerational trauma related to the Klan as a catalyst for tackling the subject in his work. Hancock explains, “Generating this encounter was my way to confront an artistic father figure and examine our respective motivations. I wanted to show that hate organizations like the Klan still exist, congregating and operating in plain sight.”
Explore these and other works in Scenes from the Collection. Plan your visit.
