Stories about how we look at Jewish artists and how Jewish artists look at the world.
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Culture In St. Louis, a Torah curtain tells the story of a woman of valor
In the basement of the Saint Louis Art museum a luminous tapestry — the centerpiece of the exhibit “Signed in Silk: Introducing a Sacred Jewish Textile” — dazzles as if lit from within. The acquisition of this 18th century Italian ark curtain, or parokhet, created by the Jewish teenage girl Simhah Viterbo in Ancona, Italy,…
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Culture A contrarian artist who took inspiration from a Hasidic rabbi and a Vietnamese general
The French artist Christian Boltanski, who died on Bastille Day at age 76, expressed emotions through conceptual art associated with Judaism as well as universal experience. His Ukrainian Jewish father escaped deportation during the Nazi Occupation of Paris by hiding in a space under the floorboards of the family apartment for 18 months. Boltanski’s mother,…
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Culture How Judy Chicago became part of art history
Judy Chicago, whose immense body of work draws on overlooked women’s history, the tragedy of the recent Jewish past and features no small amount of literal fireworks, is having yet another moment. Born Judith Sylvia Cohen in (naturally) Chicago, the artist, whose name is regularly appended with words like “controversial,” will receive her first-ever retrospective…
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Culture Meet the husband and wife behind Williamsburg’s first Hasidic art gallery
Just off Flushing Avenue, a bustling thoroughfare in Hasidic Williamsburg, there’s a basement full of art. Chiaroscuro portraits of eminent rabbis. Scenes of Jerusalem’s Western Wall. Modernist sculptures of men kissing their tefillin, tender floral still lifes, a collection of old violins splatter-painted in exuberant colors. Housed in a lower-level ballroom in the Condor Hotel,…
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Culture When the beginning meets the end: a year in reflection from a resident of the Chelsea Hotel
When I look back at the past year, my life seems to resemble a Rorschach test. Like the events of the past months were a blob of ink violently slapped into the center of a sheet of paper, folded in half and then pulled apart. The beginning mirrors the ending. It all started when I…
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Culture Arturo Schwarz — lover of art, paragon of altruism
Visitors to the Israel Museum, Tel Aviv Museum, Negev Museum of Art in Be’er Sheva, and National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome will recognize the name of Arturo Schwarz, who died June 23 at age 97. Schwarz was the munificent donor of a splendid collection of Dada and surrealist art to these institutions and…
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Culture How to master the little-known art of indoor birdwatching
On my way to a museum for the first time in 15 months, I paused at the sight of something red flashing past me in the North Woods of Central Park. I squinted into a tangle of branches and dense foliage until I saw it again — black with a splotch of red, or maybe…
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Culture Noticing how one of the world’s great noticers notices
Depending on how you look at it, Geoff Dyer is either the prototypical contemporary English-language writer or the outlier. Awards committees love him, and publishers do, too: his pace (nine books in the last 10 years!) is as relentless as Twitter’s. His range is as vast as Wikipedia’s. His style is briskly lucid; while most…
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