More than 20 years ago when I started my tenure as program director of the Jewish Museum of Maryland, I struggled to get young adults through the doors.
It wasn’t for lack of trying.
Many of our exhibitions and programming were on topics I genuinely believed would hold interest for visitors young and old — travel, beauty, entertainment, fashion and summer camps. Still, we generally fell short when it came to attracting visitors under 50.
But since the 2021 arrival of JMM Executive Director Sol Davis, the museum has become a gathering place for young adults in the Baltimore area and beyond. The museum’s exhibition “Material/Inheritance: Contemporary Work by New Jewish Culture Fellows,” which opens Mar. 26 and runs through June 11, may explain why.
“Material/Inheritance” showcases the works of 30 young visual artists, filmmakers, musicians, writers and poets who are recipients of the New Jewish Culture Fellowship. First offered in 2018, the fellowship provides Jewish artists with funding, feedback, mentoring, learning and community.
“Material/Inheritance” is the first group exhibition of work by New Jewish Culture fellows. Its subject matter includes queer and trans identities, sexuality, activist movements and politics. A series of events to take place during the run of the show will explore these subjects through diverse creative modalities.
Exhibition curator Leora Fridman, herself a New Jewish Culture fellow, says the exhibition’s title comes from the idea that “a lot of the people in the show are working with inherited cultures, namely Jewish cultures, although some of them are also working with other cultures that they’ve inherited, be they genre inheritance — meaning the type of art they work in — different kinds of backgrounds, different countries they’re from, different political movements that they’re part of.”
Fridman says she’s interested in the way the artists “use inheritances as material for making creative work, and specifically how Jewish artists make use of their inheritance to develop both existing and new material.
“Many artists who are part of this broader movement are generating new culture, new inheritance. A lot of conversations that have been happening around this kind of renaissance in contemporary Jewish art have to do with the fact that it’s providing new ways for people to plug into their Jewishness, to their identities, and also to see a lot of new possibilities that invite viewers — even if they don’t identify as artists — to think, ‘Wow, all these people are really creating new material from being Jewish, and maybe I could do that, too.’”
Struggling to Integrate
A prime example of this sensibility is the work of visual artist Shterna Goldbloom. Goldbloom (who uses the they/them pronouns) combines their Jewish inheritance with a queer identity unaccepted in the Lubavitch community in which they were raised. Fortunately, Goldbloom found acceptance in their family and extended family.
As explained in the artist’s statement, Goldbloom’s “Feygeles” project “aims to make visible what has historically been hidden. Handmade contemporary Torah scrolls reveal photographs and interviews with LGBTQIA [lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer or questioning, intersex, asexual and more] Jews who have struggled to find ways of integrating their history and family traditions with their sexuality and gender. Feygele, a Yiddish slur meaning both gay and little bird, expresses both the Queerness of these Jews and their flight.”
In creating “Feygeles,” Goldbloom was “concerned about the outside view and negative perceptions of Hasidism. I think a lot of folks assumed that my project would be really anti-Hasidism, but I actually think there’s a lot of beautiful things to be learned from Hasidism and there would be a lot lost if it would disappear. I just don’t necessarily think it worked for me.”
In addition to the scrolls, Goldbloom will have two photos from their “Shabbos” project in the exhibition. In one photo, “Chana Raizel,” a person with long red hair, reclines on a blue sofa. Another face with open eyes and red hair is superimposed to the right of the individual’s face.
“This photo was taken in grad school for my ‘Feygeles’ project and was actually a film mistake,” says Goldbloom. “I was using 4×5 negatives and accidentally took a double exposure. I loved how this felt poetically and psychologically right as Chana Raizel wasn’t ready to be seen at the time. So it stayed in my archive but I remembered it when I was thinking about the ‘Shabbos’ project.”
The other image to be displayed in the exhibition depicts the artist’s twin brother and his young daughter at a dinner table.
“He’s a rabbi, and he’s making kiddush for Shabbos,” says Goldbloom. “The image is kind of talking about reverence and also the placing of queer people and straight Hasidic rabbis together.”
Overriding the ‘Miserable Stuff’
Multi-media artist Danielle Durchslag’s work will also appear in the show. One of her pieces is a short film she describes as “a darkly comedic take on the famous song ‘Anatevka’ from ‘Fiddler on the Roof.’
“My version has new lyrics that reference and play with the tribulations of communal Jewish anxiety. So unlike the original song, my version talks about things like Tay-Sachs and poor digestion and communal trauma. And this is coming through the mouths of children,” says Durchslag.
“‘Anatevka’ is definitely a comedy but it’s also a very pointed look at some of the implications of Jewish education, focusing on our scarcity and victimhood instead of our abundance. I think there’s room for all of it. But the Jewish education I received and that many of my peers received was so laser-focused on, frankly, the miserable stuff. I do think we lose something when it overrides all the other aspects of our ancient, alive, dynamic, layered tradition.”
Durchslag will also show a sculpture made from a silver platter once belonging to her great-aunt and grandmother that was used to hold matzoh during Passover seders. The platter depicts Marie Antoinette and King Louis, and it represents Durchslag’s experience growing up in a wealthy Jewish family.
To create the sculpture, Durschlag melted down her late grandmother’s gold teeth as well as 18-karat gold and “fashioned it” into a portrait of Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner.
“When people engage with it at the museum, they’ll see I’ve added a yarmulke to Jared,” Durchslag says. “There was always French on the platter and there still is, though it’s my words now that say Ivanka was born with too much in these United States. And it says about Jared that he’s in charge of things he doesn’t understand. And at the northern and southern edge of the platter, I’ve added some language in Hebrew and the words I’ve added are ‘Forgive us,’ which is the name of the sculpture.”
Because of the sculpture’s political nature, Durchlag says most museums are concerned about how the piece will be received.
That’s where the JMM is different, she says. The fact that the museum is unafraid to show a piece that may raise eyebrows “speaks volumes about the singular role of the Jewish Museum of Maryland in the current landscape.”
The Jewish Museum of Maryland is located at 15 Lloyd St. in East Baltimore’s Jonestown community. For information about the exhibition, visit materialinheritance.com.
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