Stories about how we look at Jewish artists and how Jewish artists look at the world.
Forward With the Arts
The Latest
-
Culture How a Jewish photographer found his true calling in Chinatown
The life’s-work of the bespectacled, bow-tie wearing photojournalist Emile Bocian might have been lost forever if not for the foresight of actress Mae Wong. After Bocian died in 1990, Wong, his close friend, discovered over 120,000 photographs, negatives and contact sheets stuffed into cigarette and shoeboxes in his apartment. Knowing he had no children, and…
-
Culture ‘A lot of Black artists feel that burden — the atypical ascent of choreographer Claudia Schreier’
In the late afternoon and evening light of August, two solo hikers meet by a yellow steel structure in a grassy field. Their faces are obscured behind masks etched with anxiety as they navigate a world inhospitable to Black bodies like theirs. When they happen upon each other, their masks come off as they find…
-
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,…
-
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,…
-
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…
-
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,…
-
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…
-
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…
Explore
Most Popular
- 1
News Who was Horst Wessel, and why are people comparing Charlie Kirk to him?
- 2
Culture Charlie Kirk kept a ‘Jewish Sabbath.’ What did he mean by that?
- 3
Antisemitism Decoded Israel is being blamed for Charlie Kirk’s death. Here’s what that conspiracy theory says about the far right’s divide
- 4
Film & TV Robert Redford’s legacy is surprisingly Jewish
In Case You Missed It
-
Opinion The terrifying Nazi precedent for Jimmy Kimmel’s suspension — and the reasons to stay hopeful
-
Fast Forward Freed hostage Edan Alexander says he’s returning to the IDF next month
-
Yiddish World How a Yiddish acting troupe fooled the Tsarist government
-
Fast Forward After years of war, world’s oldest synagogue paintings are revealed as intact in Damascus
-
Shop the Forward Store
100% of profits support our journalism
