The Jewish Museum Announces the Spring 2013 Exhibition Schedule

As it were ... So to speak
A Museum Collection in Dialogue with Barbara Bloom
March 15 - August 4, 2013

Artist Barbara Bloom has devoted her career to questioning the ways we perceive and value objects. With a light touch and subtle wit, she divines the meanings encoded in the things with which we surround ourselves. The Jewish Museum invited Bloom to create an installation drawn from its more than 26,000 works of ceremonial, decorative, and fine art. Her presentation sets a selection of over 270 pieces in unconventional contexts, and offers visitors new ways to view the Museum and its holdings. The exhibition she is creating materializes the idea of people in dialogue across time and space, inspired in part by Bloom's reflections on Talmudic discourse, which takes place over centuries. Integrating the former Warburg mansion's historic rooms into her concept, the artist envisions the space as both museum and home filled with imagined historical guests - Nefertiti, Émile Zola, George Gershwin and others - from diverse times engaged in discourse and argument. The subjects are wide-ranging and reflect ideas that have long interested the artist: inferring a whole from surviving remnants, navigating the intricacies of bestowing gifts, representing the unspeakable. Furniture-shaped display cases contain collection objects that the artist finds intriguing or appealing. For example, Torah pointers with their delicate hands and extended forefingers stand in for strings inside a piano; a cigar box owned by Sigmund Freud is displayed in a psychoanalyst's consultation space; and a Dreyfus Affair game board sits on a table with ancient Roman dice. Each tableau is accompanied by written passages suggesting conversations between people. These evocative juxtapositions of found texts, Bloom's writings, artworks, and cases, create unexpected connections and spark dialogue.

Six Things: Sagmeister & Walsh
March 15 - August 4, 2013

The designers Stefan Sagmeister and Jessica Walsh are known for their experimental typography and striking visual imagery. Six Things marks the first exhibition of their newly minted design firm Sagmeister & Walsh. For the last ten years, Sagmeister has researched the nature of happiness, asking, "Is it possible to train my mind in the same way I can train my body?" In five short films and a sculpture, the studio investigates six things, culled from Sagmeister's diary, that he believes have increased his personal happiness. In addition, intrigued by a recent nationwide survey in which Jews reported the highest levels of well-being of all religious groups, Sagmeister & Walsh are creating a new typographic work designed for The Jewish Museum that connects this scientific data to his personal exploration of happiness.

Jack Goldstein x 10,000
May 10 - September 29, 2013

The first American retrospective of the Canadian-born artist Jack Goldstein (1945-2003) brings to light his important legacy. A teaching assistant for the esteemed conceptual artist John Baldessari and a contemporary of such artists as Cindy Sherman, Sherrie Levine, Laurie Simmons, Barbara Kruger, David Salle and Robert Longo, Goldstein spent his creative years in New York and Southern California and became a central figure in the Pictures Generation of the 1970s and 80s. The artists of this generation explored a new stylistic vocabulary grounded in their interest in popular culture, appropriating images from books, magazines, advertisements, television, and film. This comprehensive exhibition frames Goldstein as a pivotal artist of his generation and showcases his influential paintings and films, while also including installations, ephemera, writings, and pioneering sound recordings. Goldstein transformed, restaged, and remade films in such a way as to strip out specific details, context, and function. Exhibition highlights include his celebrated film of a growling Metro-Goldwyn Mayer lion Another signature work is the film The Jump featuring a leaping diver, performing a somersault and disintegrating into fragments. Given Goldstein's legacy and his increasing relevance to younger artists, this long overdue retrospective is essential to a larger re-evaluation of post-1960s American art. Organized by the Orange County Museum of Art and guest-curated by Philipp Kaiser.

The Jewish Museum is located at 1109 Fifth Avenue at 92nd Street, New York City. Museum hours are Saturday, Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday, 11am to 5:45pm; Thursday, 11am to 8pm; and Friday, 11am to 4pm. Museum admission is $12 for adults, $10 for senior citizens, $7.50 for students, free for children under 12 and Jewish Museum members. Admission is pay-what-you-wish on Thursdays from 5pm to 8pm, and free on Saturdays. For information on The Jewish Museum, the public may call 212.423.3200 or visit the website at www.TheJewishMuseum.org.