Currently on view, Leonard Cohen: A Crack in Everything is the first exhibition entirely devoted to the imagination and legacy of the influential singer/songwriter, man of letters, and global icon from Montréal, Canada. Also on view, as part of Scenes from the Collection, is The Gift: Works from the Barnett and Annalee Newman Foundation Collection, which includes works by Adolph Gottlieb, John Graham, Jasper Johns, Alexander Lieberman, Robert Gray Murray, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Rauschenberg, Aaron Siskind, and Frank Stella. Opening this fall are Edith Halpert and the Rise of American Art, focusing on the first significant female gallerist in the United States, and Rachel Feinstein: Maiden, Mother, Crone, the first survey of the New York-based artist in the United States.
Featuring large-scale, immersive contemporary artworks inspired by the themes of the life and work of the influential singer/songwriter, man of letters, and global icon, Leonard Cohen: A Crack in Everything is an unforgettable visual and auditory experience. Taking up over two floors of the Jewish Museum, the exhibition features commissioned works by a range of international artists such as Kara Blake, Candice Breitz, Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller, Christophe Chassol, Daily tous les jours, Tacita Dean, Kota Ezawa, George Fok, Ari Folman, Jon Rafman, and Taryn Simon. It also includes a video projection showcasing Cohen’s own drawings, and a multimedia gallery where visitors can hear covers of Cohen’s songs by musicians such as Lou Doillon; Feist; Moby; and The National with Sufjan Stevens, Ragnar, Kjartansson, and Richard Reed Parry, among others. Organized by the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (MAC), the exhibition is curated by John Zeppetelli, director and chief curator at the MAC, and Victor Shiffman, co-curator.
The Gift: Works from the Barnett and Annalee Newman Foundation Collection is the first in a series of exhibitions drawn from the Foundation’s donation of artworks to the Jewish Museum.
The Gift is installed within
Scenes from the Collection, the Jewish Museum’s third-floor collection exhibition. This exhibition focuses on part of a major gift to the Museum from The Barnett and Annalee Newman Foundation which included artworks from the Newmans’ personal collection. These works were gifts to the couple from their artist-friends, and include intimate pieces by Adolph Gottlieb, John Graham, Jasper Johns, Alexander Lieberman, Robert Gray Murray, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Rauschenberg, Aaron Siskind, and Frank Stella. Archival documents on loan from the Barnett Newman Foundation accompany the works on view, and comprise photographs, letters, and sketches shared amongst the artists.
Edith Halpert and the Rise of American Art is the first exhibition to explore the remarkable career of Edith Halpert (1900-1970), the influential American art dealer and founder of the Downtown Gallery in New York City. A pioneer in the field and the first significant female gallerist in the United States, Halpert propelled American art to the fore at a time when the European avant-garde still enthralled the world. The artists she supported – Stuart Davis, Jacob Lawrence, Georgia O’Keeffe, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Ben Shahn, and Charles Sheeler key among them – became icons of American modernism. With her revolutionary program at the Downtown Gallery, which she founded in 1926, Halpert inspired generations of Americans to value the art of their own country, in their own time. The exhibition will feature approximately 100 works of American modern and folk art, including paintings, sculptures, and prints by such artists as Davis, Lawrence, O’Keeffe, Kuniyoshi, Shahn, and Sheeler, as well as Arthur Dove, Elie Nadelman, Max Weber, and Marguerite and William Zorach, among others, as well as prime examples of American folk art portraits, weathervanes, trade signs, and carved toys.
Rachel Feinstein: Maiden, Mother, Crone is the first survey of the New York-based artist in the United States. Three decades of Feinstein’s work in sculpture, installation, painting, drawing, and video, as well as a newly commissioned wall-relief, a panoramic wallpaper, and the artist’s sculptural maquettes will be brought together to emphasize her fascination with the dualistic nature of cultural expression and everyday life, how fundamental yet oppositional concepts coexist and are ceaselessly negotiated in art and the construction of identity. From Feinstein’s earliest to her most recent works, female figures and protagonists dominate – a distinguishing feature of both the artist’s practice and this exhibition. Feinstein probes how notions of “the feminine” manifest in the popular imagination, an investigation that pulses through and binds together
Maiden, Mother, Crone.
