Cellist Maya Beiser Set for BEAUTY IS POWER at The Jewish Museum

Bang on a Can: Beauty Is Power, a concert featuring "cello goddess" (The New Yorker) Maya Beiser, will take place at the Jewish Museum on Thursday, January 29 at 7:30pm. Tied to the Museum's exhibition, Helena Rubinstein: Beauty Is Power, the first exhibition about the legendary cosmetics entrepreneur and trendsetting art collector Helena Rubinstein, the performance will highlight powerful women composers. This program is the third concert of the Jewish Museum and Bang on a Can's partnership to produce a series of dynamic musical performances at the Museum from June 2014 to May 2015, inspired by the Jewish Museum's diverse slate of exhibitions.

Maya Beiser's concert features beautiful music by powerful women. From Hildegard von Bingen to Janis Joplin and Imogen Heap, Anna Clyne to Yoko Ono, this program explores themes of beauty, spirituality, and ritual. The concert will include the U.S. premiere of Anna Clyne's Rest These Hands and a version of Yoko Ono's seminal performance Cut Piece presented in collaboration with the innovative design trio threeASFOUR, whose 2014 Jewish Museum exhibition MER KA BA was hailed as "one of a kind" by Vogue.

Of her Beauty Is Power program, Maya says, "Inspired by the fascinating self-made beauty industry powerhouse Helena Rubinstein, I asked myself: Is beauty powerful? Is power beautiful? Can we, women, be both beautiful and powerful? Can we find our inner sway when we feel beautiful? In my art, I think a lot about beauty. For me, performing music is the act of peeling through layers of beauty, revealing its many faces. Today, women have seized the commerce of beauty; most fashion magazines are spearheaded by powerful women. But throughout the millennia, the art of music - the ultimate form of beauty - has been monopolized by men."

The January 29 performance includes O Virtus Sapientiae by Hildegard von Bingen, Summertime by Janis Joplin, the U.S. premiere of Rest These Hands by Anna Clyne, Byzantine Chant arranged by Aleksandra Vrebalov, Maya's own arrangement of Hide and Seek by Imogen Heap, and an homage performance of Yoko Ono's Cut Piece, with music from Far-Off Country by Eve Beglarian.

About Helena Rubinstein: Beauty Is Power
Helena Rubinstein: Beauty Is Power is the first museum exhibition to explore the ideas, innovations, and influence of the legendary cosmetics entrepreneur Helena Rubinstein (1872-1965). By the time of her death, Rubinstein had risen from humble origins in small-town Jewish Poland to become a global icon of female entrepreneurship and a leader in art, fashion, design, and philanthropy. As the head of a cosmetics empire that extended across four continents, she was, arguably, the first modern self-made woman magnate. Rubinstein was ahead of her time in her embrace of cultural and artistic diversity. She was not only an early patron of European and Latin American modern art, but also one of the earliest, leading collectors of African and Oceanic sculpture. The exhibition explores how Madame (as she was universally known) helped break down the status quo of taste by blurring boundaries between commerce, art, fashion, beauty, and design. Through 200 objects - works of art, photographs, and ephemera - Helena Rubinstein: Beauty Is Power reveals how Rubinstein's unique style and pioneering approaches to business challenged conservative taste and heralded a modern notion of beauty, democratized and accessible to all.

Public programs are made possible by endowment support from the William Petschek Family, the Trustees of the Salo W. and Jeannette M. Baron Foundation, William Halo, Benjamin Zucker, the Marshall M. Weinberg Fund, with additional support from Marshall M. Weinberg, the Rita J. and Stanley H. Kaplan Foundation, the Saul and Harriet M. Rothkopf Family Foundation and Ellen Liman. Public support is provided by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.