Perhaps it’s time to stop being surprised by the disproportionate number of successful Jews in any random profession. That’s one of the lessons to take from “Masters of Illusion: Jewish Magicians of the Golden Age,” an entertaining exhibit at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles on view until September 4. The exhibit runs concurrently…
In the world of Jewish museums and art collections, there is no more iconic landscape than Jerusalem. But how many ways can one see the Dome of the Rock, the Old City gates or the shuk at Mahane Yehuda before they become static tropes? With such a heavily charged backdrop, photography of Jerusalem often devolves…
The Skirball Center, a sober cultural institution on Los Angeles’s ritzy Westside, was unusually alive on January 27. Music journalists, record executives and South American diplomats with an array of Spanish accents — from Argentina to Spain to East Los Angeles — bounced about the room. Along with the requisite contingent of L.A. yentas and…
In this, the second annual Forward Fives selection, we celebrate the year’s cultural output with a series of deliberately eclectic choices in film, music, theater, exhibitions and books. Here we present five of the most important Jewish exhibitions of 2010. Feel free to argue with and add to our selections in the comments. Shifting the…
Upon viewing “The 1,000 Journals Project” at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles, I thought of chickens and eggs. Launched by San Francisco graphic designer Brian Singer in 2000, the project sent out one thousand, 220-page blank notebooks across 40 countries and all 50 states with the intention of fostering a global creative community…
“The Pieces of Me: L.A. GOAL,” a new exhibit at Los Angeles’s Skirball Cultural Center, inverts the challenge of most contemporary art shows. Typically, genre-defying works by important-to-know names hang on a blank wall, demanding interpretation. A brief scholarly paragraph may accompany selected pieces, but the viewer must summon their own aesthetic lexicon to construct…
It may be hard to believe, but Sukkah City — the ambitious, large-scale architectural competition that took over Manhattan’s Union Square Park for two days last week — came from modest beginnings. “The idea came to me this past fall while I was doing sketches for my own backyard sukkah,” co-founder Joshua Foer told the…
Monday night at New York University’s Skirball Center, The Culture Project presented its sold out “Blueprint for Accountability: Rule of Law: Torture, Democracy, Privatization, Habeas Corpus,” another of their decade-and-a-half long string of attempts to mix social activism with artistic production. As Brecht and Orwell and Abbie Hoffman showed, when art and politics are united…
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