The Contemporary Jewish Museum’s first open-call exhibition of works by California Jewish artists will launch June 6, two months after seven anti-Zionist artists withdrew from the exhibit and against the backdrop of tension across the art world over the Israel-Hamas war.
The inaugural California Jewish Open was planned before Oct. 7 and reflects the CJM’s mission “to enable Jewish artists to be seen and heard,” said Kerry King, CJM’s interim executive director.
Some of the artworks on view will be statements about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, while others will be less overtly political reflections on the exhibit’s theme of “connection” — to Judaism, to the world, to one another or to the artist’s own personal history.
Bay Area artist Liz Lauter contributed a sculpted head of a woman wearing an ornate headdress of birds and flowers that she calls, simply, “Bride.” It is one of a series she has created around the Biblical story of Adam and Eve, interpreted through her own life as a Jewish woman, wife and mother. Lauter submitted this piece because she “feels honored just to be a Jewish artist reflecting on the universal experience of being a woman.”
Film and visual artist Tiffany Shlain offered a variation of her tree-ring chronology art. Whereas the original work represented milestones in women’s history along a tree’s growth rings, her piece for the CJM, titled “The Center Will Hold,” charts her personal growth as “Earthling, mother, Jewess, feminist, American.”
“This piece poured out of me after the horrors of Oct. 7,” Shlain, who lives in San Francisco, said. “Elements of my identity have been magnified by that event and its ongoing aftermath. In this sculpture, I examine how my personal history connects to the larger universal one.”
Describing the period since the Hamas attack as “excruciating,” she said that the rise in global antisemitism has also made her feel “very connected with my ancestors.”
An open-call exhibit like the California Jewish Open invites artists to apply with previously created or new work, and then the submissions shape the exhibit. Previous group shows at the CJM, such as the Dorothy Saxe Invitational, have included both Jewish and non-Jewish artists.
“We heard from our community that there were not many exhibition opportunities specifically for Jewish artists, and the CJM is one of very few such venues in the United States,” King said.
About 500 artists responded to the CJM’s call. Fifty-four were selected, including some whose submissions, artist statements or both were expressions of their opposition to Israel’s military response to Oct. 7 or to Zionism in general.
“After Oct. 7, it would be impossible for at least some of the artworks not to include this point of view,” CJM senior curator Heidi Rabben said. “The exhibition is a microcosm of ideas and conversations happening within the Jewish community. And the violence in Israel and Gaza is a significant part of that conversation.”
However, after the acceptance letters went out, seven of the selected artists withdrew their work, taking a stance against the museum’s sources of funding or rejecting the requirement that the artists agree to show their work in a context of diverse viewpoints.
The curators decided to leave blank spaces on the walls where those artists’ works would have hung.
“I was disappointed, in that we wanted to offer space for all the views and whatever the artists wanted to express,” Rabben said. “But I don’t blame anyone personally for doing what they felt they needed to do. We respect all of the artists individually.”
Elissa Strauss, artistic director of the arts incubator nonprofit LABA Bay, worked with Rabben as guest curator for the exhibit. Strauss emphasized that it will still be a “full and challenging experience” but also expressed disappointment about the artists who pulled out.
“This is an art museum — it should be a place of dialogue, of questions, openings, considering new realities, of using imagination as a place to help us construct these new realities,” she said. “So I think it would have been wonderful for them to be in the show.”
Some anti-Zionists, including El Sobrante artist Lisa Kokin, decided to remain in the show. For Kokin, her long-running respect for CJM led to that decision.
“When I show my work, I hope for a conversation. Sometimes I hear interpretations I hadn’t thought of. This is the wonder of art,” she wrote in an opinion piece for J.
The withdrawals took place in the context of an art world that is roiling with controversy over how artists and art institutions should respond to the war.
In February, several artists altered their works in an exhibit at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and demanded that the museum remove Zionists from its board, which led to the temporary closure of the exhibit and the resignation of YBCA’s Jewish CEO over what she deemed an “antisemitic backlash.” Last month, employees of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art published an open letter to museum leadership expressing solidarity with Palestinians and calling for the museum to boycott Israel.
“It’s a complicated time,” Strauss acknowledged. “Overall we just respect that everyone has to do what works for them, and if you’re not comfortable being in the exhibit, I get it. Everybody’s just trying to navigate this moment in a way that they feel they have integrity, which is not easy. Everybody has to do it in ways that feel authentic and right for them.”
With diverse pieces by the remaining 47 artists, the exhibit features a range of ideas, interests, aesthetics, mediums and responses to both Jewish tradition and contemporary events. Thirty-eight of the artists live in the Bay Area, eight in Southern California and one in Nevada County.
Strauss organized the submissions into four broad groupings that explore our relationship with the Earth, with other humans, the past and future, and the Divine.
Bay Area sound artist and musician Forest Reid created an interactive installation, “Dreydl: Zol Zayn Mit Mazel, 2023,” that is part of the “human” category. It brings together Hebrew numerology, dreidel games and ancient texts with a vintage slot machine.
Some pieces can be interpreted as referencing the political conflict “in less didactic and more layered ways” than the pieces that were withdrawn, Strauss said.
One such work, an installation by Israel-born Bonny Nahmias, is called “The Orchestra of Space Holders.” It features a tin can telephone stretched across the gallery, accompanied by her book of drawings. Photos show people communicating via the tin can device across the barrier wall between Israel and the West Bank, and across the Twin Peaks of San Francisco, “places where communication has been broken by geography, modernity and politics,” she said.
Another is a video installation by Rebecca Ora that uses a clip from a 2013 Israeli movie about a love relationship between an Israeli and a Palestinian. As Strauss describes the piece, “It plays on loop with them almost kissing. The clip ends before they get there. Like [the John Keats’ poem] ‘Ode to a Grecian Urn,’ they’re locked eternally in an almost-embrace. I thought it was a meaningful way to bring in the war that deals with connection in many ways.”
Other pieces probe deeply into the roots of the artists’ identities.
Alex Stern, one of eight artists in the show from Southern California, said he defines himself without qualifiers as “an artist” and that he is not traditionally religious. Nevertheless, Stern’s submission is a large abstract painting of curving lines in a rainbow of colors, layered over a Star of David.
“As an artist, I encounter this need to avoid every subject until arriving at what is helplessly unavoidable,” he said. “One of those things, which operates as a true love at the end of the day, ends up being the Star of David for me, in relation to an identity that is as absolute within me as anything could be, and therefore unavoidable.”
Like Stern, San Francisco painter, sculptor and collage artist Amy Trachtenberg said she has “not identified as a Jewish artist or one that makes content that is specifically Jewish, but my history is planted and has landed in my work in many ways over the years, even if obliquely.”
Her hanging sculpture, a web of deconstructed women’s bras with glass fragments dangling in the spaces between the straps and wires, is full of suggestion and open to interpretation.
Describing it as an “architecturally gorgeous piece,” Strauss said “It invites questions viscerally. By linking bras together, there’s some beautiful collective feminine energy happening in it.”
Trachtenberg said she wanted to submit her work to the CJM show because she was “curious about what it would be like to have a more formal Jewish connection as an artist.” However, after Oct. 7 and after the seven artists pulled out in protest, the situation became more complicated.
“I questioned whether I should stay in it,” she said. “I didn’t want to be part of a show that would be viewed as Zionist or anti-Zionist. I wanted it to have a sense of free speech, which I see as different from both sides-ism. If the museum identifies as a Jewish institution, to show a plurality of views is essential. I don’t see it as selling out.”
While Stern was not conflicted over his participation in the show, he empathizes with those who urge artists and art institutions to leverage their influence for political change.
“I feel only love for them,” he said. “I’ve talked with people about the war from every angle. I understand them and wish them peace however they can find it. We all get through it however we can. One thing we have in common is that we are all heartbroken.”
Shlain said that the language of art is also a common denominator, regardless of political views.
“At my core, I have always been about connectedness,” Shlain said. “I’m compelled to create in these complicated times, to express through my art the feelings I’m having about the world. That’s how I process and contribute, I hope, to being some kind of bridge.”