Menachem Wecker
By Menachem Wecker
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Culture Painting Apartheid’s Silhouette
William Kentridge’s tapestry, “Porter Series: Géographie des Hebreux ou Tableau de la dispersion des Enfants de Noë” (2005), shows two silhouetted figures, with their respective heads replaced by a rotary telephone and a megaphone, walking over a map of southern Europe, northern Africa and the Middle East. The map mostly follows Genesis’s account of the…
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Culture Hip Hop’s Unlikely Portraitists
Two Jewish baby boomers — who live on opposite sides of the country and have never met — have both, on the advice of their sons, turned to the hip-hop community for artistic fodder. Although neither is comfortable being labeled a Jewish artist, New York-based painter Alex Melamid recognizes a major Jewish presence in hip…
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News A Portrait of the Artist as a (Very) Young Man
According to the London-based Saatchi Gallery’s Web site, painter Freddie Linsky, who has recently shown in Boston and in West Palm Beach, Fla., has dedicated his “whole life” to his art and is a “familiar face” at press viewings held at London’s major galleries. But though Saatchi’s mission is to present work by “largely unseen…
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News Shabbat in The Age of Technology
Every day, thou shalt use iPods and cell phones. But on one day, no iPod shall rise upon thy face and thou shalt surely place no cell phone beside thy ear. With the exponential increase in all sorts of media in the so-called digital era, Shabbat observance today demands far more abstinence than simply ignoring…
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Culture The Masculine Mystique
In Roy Rub’s new work, “Promise Lands,” the artist and typographer uses old advertisements to engage with the process of leaving one promised land (Israel) for another (New York). In “Promise Lands,” Rub compares the American cowboy, particularly the Marlboro man, with the Israeli pilot. Both are “cool,” iconic has-beens. “My Son the Pilot” is…
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Culture The Jewish McLuhan
The Future of Art in a Digital Age: From Hellenistic to Hebraic Consciousness By Mel Alexenberg Intellect, 187 pages, $60. As a wakeup call to “an indifferent world” and “Jews with their heads in the sand,” Mel Alexenberg designed a Holocaust memorial to honor the 6 million Jews in Israel “incinerated by an Iranian nuclear…
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Culture Arts-or-Crafts
When a friend’s 4-year-old son embraced one of Ruth Duckworth’s pots and said “Mama,” the sculptor made an unusual choice: She let the name stick. Duckworth, who has always resisted labeling her pieces, now calls some of them “Mama Pots.” This was a rare concession for an artist who generally grants viewers complete interpretive control…
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Culture Walking Away From Icons
Although artist Lazar (El) Markovich Lissitzky flirted with numerous movements — including Suprematism, the Bauhaus, De Stijl and Constructivism — to some he will always be doomed to remain the artist whose work resembles that of Marc Chagall. Many Jewish art enthusiasts, who are often prone to describe everything as Chagall-like, frequently confuse the two…
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