Opening Exhibitions at the new
Oregon Jewish Museum
The Shape of Time: accumulations of place and memory
The Shape of Time: accumulations of place and memory explores urban landscape and public memory through the lens of the Jewish experience in Oregon. The Oregon Jewish Museum’s extensive archives of historical photographs (both present and familiar and long gone locations in and around Portland and the state) serve as a memory bank from which invited artists will choose a sampling. The exhibition will feature the artists’ photographic responses to the original works –juxtaposing “past” and “present” images as a unit.
The goal of the exhibit is to go beyond historical comparisons of familiar locations or architecture. Rather, the work will initiate a dialogue about the specifics of Jewish history in Oregon as it ties to spatial location and public memory. Equally important, we are interested in how a photographic response to archival images might augment, shape or replace an eroded group memory, which never depended on historians in the first place. This step into a city’s and a culture’s well of history and memory helps us to uncover what Dolores Hayden has called “the power of place–the power of ordinary urban landscapes to nurture citizens’ public memory, to encompass shared time in the form of shared territory.” The intersection of private observation and collective memory captured by the photographs and our reactions to them should help us gain new perspectives on change.
Continue...
Arnold Newman–Street Scenes
“We don’t take pictures with our cameras, we take them with our hearts and minds. It is how we photograph not what we photograph, that matters. For me, I am interested in what motivates individuals, what they do with their lives, their personalities and how I perceive and interpret them. But of equal importance and perhaps even more important is that, even if the person is not known or is forgotten, the photograph itself should still be of interest or even excite the viewer. That is what my life and work is all about.”
Arnold Newman (1918-2006) started his photography career in Miami Beach in the late 1930's. He moved to New York in 1941, where he met photographers and curators, including Beaumont Hall and Alfred Steiglitz. Newman is best known as the innovator of the "environmental portraiture," a style that places its subjects in a carefully composed setting that captures the essence of their work and personality.
Newman’s first photographs were street scenes. Through these images he learned to balance place with human presence. Inspired by Farm Security Administration photographs of America’s depression years, he sought out people in everyday settings, and compositionally connected them to the places in his images.
Arnold Newman stands as one of the most widely exhibited and collected American photographers. The Oregon Jewish Museum is pleased to exhibit these rare examples of his early photographs.
Photographs Courtesy the Arnold and Augusta Newman Foundation
The Berger Collection of Ceremonial Judaica
Throughout their lives together, Mira and Gustav Berger collected Jewish ceremonial objects, focusing on silver, glass, copper tin, parchment and fine art. Part of this collection has been donated to the Oregon Jewish Museum. The objects on exhibit span nearly 150 years and offer an impressive visual history of European makers of ceremonial Judaica.
Gustav Berger was born in Vienna in 1920, where his father and grandfather dealt in art and antiques. Mira came from Vilna, Poland. Her parents taught in private Jewish elementary schools. After meeting in Italy following World War II, the Bergers moved to New York in 1954, where Gustav began his illustrious career as a painting conservator, opening his own studio in 1967. He was an inventive conservator and developed BEVA, an adhesive for painting conservators still widely used today. Gustav Berger died in March 2006 after a lengthy illness. In the many tributes that followed, he was hailed as the man who had “arguably the most influence on the techniques and materials used in the present-day conservation of easel paintings.”
Mira has been an active writer throughout her life. She began her career with articles about Hebrew education and culture in Europe between the World Wars and in the Vilna Ghetto. Mira’s eloquent memoir, “We Are at War: Memories of a Holocaust Survivor” was published in 2008. In 2007, Mira Berger designated a special fund, the Gustav and Raphael Berger Memorial Fund, in memory of her husband and son, for the conservation of artifacts. Contributions to this fund ensure that the Oregon Jewish Museum collection receives a high standard of care and conservation.
Deanne Belinoff – The Book of Keys
The Book of Keys uses the idea of time as a means to convey words and visual symbols. Deanne Belinoff began the piece in 1987 in Venice, California and intends for the work to be open-ended and unfinished.
Belinoff is a recipient of two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Arts Council Grants and and Artist Trust Grant from Seattle. A finalist for the Flintridge Award, her work is in many collections such as the Los Angles County Museum of Art, the Peter Norton Family Foundation Collection and the King County Portable Collection.
Alex Appella – The Janos Book
"The Janos Book" tells a story through letters, photographs, maps, memorabilia, poetry, conversations, and paintings spun into 29 full color collages that illustrate the revelation of a secret, an ancestry, an identity and a family. Appella recounts the saga of a Hungarian Jewish family, including some who made their way to the Americas, where today they have descendants in Oregon.
Since its publication, “The Janos Book,” has been acquired by several distinguished collections including the University of Oregon Architecture and Allied Arts Library; Harold and Arlene Schnitzer; Stanford University, Judaic Collections; University of California, Irvine; University of California, Santa Barbara; The Phoenix, Ariz., Public Library; Yale University; Smith College; Texas Tech University; Wesleyan College and Williams College.
Appella is an Oregon native who lives today Córdoba, Argentina, today where she continues to work in collage, bookbinding and writing. She is the grand niece of the man referenced in the book’s title, the late Janos Szenti, which is a pseudonym, used at his request.
Shelley Jordon – Family History
In her recent work Shelley Jordon has been experimenting with a variety of new media to explore the intersection of interior and exterior worlds and connections between past and present experiences. Family History, her first animated painting, explores the unique crossroads between motherhood and daughterhood through the examination of her own maternal lineage and how each new experience is filtered through our perceptions of previous ones. The process of creating Family History, on a single sheet of paper by repeatedly layering more than five hundred images over old becomes a metaphor for life itself.
Shelley Jordon is a Brooklyn born, Portland-based artist best known for her large-scale still life paintings that celebrate the power and beauty of domestic spaces and objects. A recipient of a Fulbright-Hayes Group Travel Research Grant and an Oregon Artist’s Fellowship Award in Painting, Jordon is a Professor of Art at Oregon State University. She had a mid-career retrospective at the Frye Museum in Seattle, WA and her artwork has been included in the Oregon Biennial at the Portland Art Museum, the Portland Museum of Art Biennial (Portland, Maine), the Northwest Biennial at the Tacoma Art Museum, and the Pacific Northwest Annual at the Bellevue Art Museum as well as exhibitions at galleries and museums in New York, Montana, Chicago and San Francisco. She received her BFA from the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan and her MFA from Brooklyn College, also in New York. She has recently returned from the American Academy in Rome where she was a visiting artist this past spring.
Family History received the “Silver Coyote, Critic’s Choice Award” at the Gold Coyote Super Short Film Festival in Oregon in May 2009 and has been screened at film festivals in Australia and Germany.
www.oj
