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MAY 2022 PROGRAMS
CSP
The Walnut Street Synagogue is pleased to be a partner congregation of the Orange County Jewish Community Scholar Program. Please join us at an upcoming program!
Sunday “Main Stage” Series
Session 1 – What Makes Contemporary Art Compelling and Singular? – Sunday, May 15, 7:00 pm EDT
Session 2 – Ritual and the Art of Tobi Kahn – Sunday, May 22, 7:00 pm EDT
Session 3 – Words as Image – Sunday, May 29, 7:00 pm EDT
(online in partnership with the Orange County Jewish Community Scholar Program)
Session 1 – What Makes Contemporary Art Compelling and Singular? – We will explore 7 contemporary artists who raise issues such as culture, politics, religion, sexuality and the environment in relationship to themselves and their work. Artists we will discuss include: Mark Bradford, Rackstraw Downes, Liza Lou, Marilyn Minter, Shirin Neshat, Meg Webster, Ai Weiwei & Billie Zangewa.
Session 2 – Ritual and the Art of Tobi Kahn – Join us for a presentation on ceremonial objects that Tobi has created over 30 years, both personal and communal – including Baby Naming Chairs, Omer Counter, Synagogue Interior, Memorial Lights, Tu b’Shvat Seder Plate and most recently a Sukkah/Meditative Space.
Session 3 – Words as Image – Artists are still finding new ways to manipulate paint, canvas, and space, and they’re constantly developing new reasons to turn words into art. Using language, these artists transform the alphabet into art. Join us as we explore the art of Jenny Holzer, Elaine Reicheck, Mel Bochner, Barbara Kruger, Christopher Wool, Robert Indiana & Lawrence Weiner.
This program is fully funded by a grant from the Jewish Community Foundation Orange County.
Program video – Session 2
Program video – Session 3
Friday Conversations: Sacred Space, Sacred Time, Sacred Objects
Session 1 – Friday, May 13 12:30 pm EDT
Session 2 – Friday, May 20, 12:30 pm EDT
Session 3 – Friday, May 27, 12:30 pm EDT
(online in partnership with the Orange County Jewish Community Scholar Program)
Join us for three Friday conversations with artist Tobi Kahn as we explore the relationship between art and Jewish tradition. These 45 minute sessions will start with a short opening by Tobi and then turn to an open discussion based on your questions.
Session 1 – Sacred Space – On the relationship between museums, shrines, synagogues and the white cube and the human need for sacred spaces.
Session 2 – Sacred Time – On how time plays a role in art (the shift to video, sound, performance art and more) and its connections with Jewish time.
Session 3 – Sacred Objects
On the relationship between Judaica and fine arts and how objects hold memory and meaning.
This program is fully funded by a grant from the Jewish Community Foundation Orange County.
Program video – Session 1
Program video – Session 2
Program video – Session 3
Thursday Series – 4 Virtual Global Gallery Tours
Session 1 – Thursday, May 5, 3:30 pm EDT
Session 2 – Thursday, May 12, 3:30 pm EDT
Session 3 – Thursday, May 19, 3:30 pm EDT
Session 4 – Thursday, May 26, 3:30 pm EDT
(online in partnership with the Orange County Jewish Community Scholar Program)
Join artist Tobi Kahn as he takes us on four exhilarating and diverse virtual global gallery tours featuring exhibitions of world renowned artists. Throughout the program we will view exhibitions, virtually meet artists, curators and art historians and hear about their perspectives on the works viewed. Participants will be introduced to what is new and important in the art world. The goal of the course is for participants to view art critically. Tobi Kahn’s gallery tours were ranked #1 in New York Magazine’s “Best Bets”.
This program is fully funded by a grant from the Jewish Community Foundation Orange County.
Program video – Session 1
Program video – Session 2
Program video – Session 3
Program video – Session 4
Tuesday Series – Conversations with 4 Groundbreaking Contemporary Artists
Session 1 – Leonardo Drew – Tuesday, May 3, 1:00 pm EDT
Session 2 – Mierle Laderman Ukeles – Tuesday, May 10, 1:00 pm EDT
Session 3 – Larry Abramson – Tuesday, May 17, 1:00 pm EDT
Session 4 – Ariel Hacohen – Tuesday, May 24, 1:00 pm EDT
(online in partnership with the Orange County Jewish Community Scholar Program)
Join us for a series of conversations between Tobi Kahn and four outstanding artists who have added greatly to the contemporary artistic conversation in diverse mediums.
Session 1 – Leonardo Drew – For over three decades, Leonardo Drew has become known for creating contemplative abstract sculptural works that play upon a tension between order and chaos. At once monumental and intimate in scale, his work recalls post-Minimalist sculpture that alludes to America’s industrial past. Drew transforms accumulations of raw materials such as wood, scrap metal, and cotton to articulate various overlapping themes with emotional gravitas: from the cyclical nature of life and decay to the erosion of time. His surfaces often approach a language of their own, embodying the labored process of writing oneself into history. Drew’s works have been shown internationally and are included in numerous public collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; and Tate, London.
Session 2 – Mierle Laderman Ukeles – For almost half a century, Mierle Laderman Ukeles has been making art across a range of media and processes to challenge our ideas of work, care, and collaborative art practices. In her early work, Ukeles made abstract, messy, bodily sculptures, but it was her entrance into motherhood that provided a catalyst for her most significant and enduring idea of “maintenance art” and the “maintenance artist”. Ukeles understood motherhood and domestic labor as a kind of maintenance work and wanted to make this work visible by framing it as an art practice. Ukeles has documented her encounters with different kinds of care-workers, including sanitation workers and cleaners, and has also undertaken massive environmental care work, in the case of her current long-term project regenerating a landfill site in New York. Ukeles expanded on Marcel Duchamp’s idea of the readymade, by stating not only that any found object can become art, but also that found actions, habits, and everyday activities, particularly those performed by women and working-class people, can be art too.
Session 3 – Larry Abramson – Born in 1954 in South Africa, Larry Abramson went on to live in Israel in 1961. He studied at the Chelsea School of Art in London between 1973-1974 and received the Kolliner Award for young artists from the Israel Museum in 1979. He is assistant director of the Jerusalem Print Workshop at the Florence Miller Art Center where much of the most interesting printmaking in Israel today takes place. Although he still sees himself primarily as a painter the disciplines and opportunities provided by printmaking were significant in the development of his art allowing him to clarify his use of color and form. His prints tend to follow a strict formal structure with a square format and a limited palette. Abramson constructs his screenprints by progressive overprintings of more or less transparent colours partially covering or exposing the layer underneath. The result of this is that he creates several planes within the image and ‘the sensation of an emerging or submerging image; the feeling that you are looking at reflections never quite able to see the actual source of the image’. Abramson has held many one-man shows in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and New York and also participated in numerous group exhibitions. He is a founding member of “Artists Without Walls”, a dialogue group of Israeli and Palestinian artists and was Chairman of the Bezalel Academy’s Fine Art department between 1992-1999, and in 1996 became the founding director of the Bezalel Program for Young Artists, the post-graduate program which became the first Master of Fine Art course in Israel (jointly with the Hebrew University).
Session 4 – Ariel Hacohen -Ariel Hacohen (b.1993, Jerusalem) is a conceptual photography artist, working predominantly with black and white snapshot photography, digital image-manipulation and video-art. In addition, he sculpts ‘photographic sculptures’, creating objects using 3D modelling and casting techniques. Ariel has participated in numerous group exhibitions in museums and galleries across Israel, including the Israel Museum, Jerusalem; The New Gallery – Teddy, Jerusalem (2020); the International Photography Festival, Tel Aviv; the Hecht Museum, Haifa; the HaCubia Gallery, Jerusalem (2019); the Beit HaGefen Gallery, Haifa (2016); and more. Since September 2020, he is enrolling in the MA Photography programme at the Royal College of Art, London. As a B.F.A graduate (with Hons) of the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem (2015-2019), Ariel was awarded several academic prizes: the Lauren & Mitchell Presser Award for Excellence in Photography (2020); the Yossi Breger Award for Excellence in Photography (2019); the Excellence Award of the Visual and Material Culture Department (2019); and the Bezalel Excellence Award (2018). In 2017, he was selected to participate in a student exchange programme at the École des Beaux-Arts de Paris (ENSBA). In 2019, Ariel was awarded the America-Israel Cultural Foundation (AICF) Scholarship for excellence in photography and the Hecht Prize for Young Artists in the field of fine arts. Between January and October 2020, before moving to London for his MA studies, he participated at the Art Cube Artists’ Studios residency program in Talpiot, Jerusalem. Ariel is the recipient of the Clore-Bezalel Scholarship for full tuition for his studies at the Royal College of Art.
This program is fully funded by a grant from the Jewish Community Foundation Orange County.
Program video – Session 1
Program video – Session 2
Program video – Session 3
Program video – Session 4
Harry Haft: Survivor of Auschwitz, Challenger of Rocky Marciano
Monday, May 2, 1:00 pm EDT
(online in partnership with the Orange County Jewish Community Scholar Program)
Join us to learn about the life and challenges of Harry Haft from Harry’s son Alan Scott Haft, author of Harry Haft: Survivor of Auschwitz, Challenger of Rocky Marciano. Harry Haft was a sixteen-year-old Polish Jew when he entered a concentration camp in 1944. Forced to fight other Jews in bare-knuckle bouts for the perverse entertainment of SS officers, Haft quickly learned that his own survival depended on his ability to fight and win. Ultimately escaping the Nazis, Haft left an embittered and pugnacious young man. Determined to find freedom, Haft traveled to America and began a career as a professional boxer, quickly finding success using his sharp instincts and fierce confidence. In a historic battle, Haft fought in a match with Rocky Marciano, the future undefeated heavyweight champion of the world. The Survivor, a biopic about Harry Haft based on Alan’s book, directed by Barry Levinson and starring Ben Foster, will premier on HBO and HBO Max on April 27th.
Alan Scott Haft was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1950. He is a 1973 graduate of Queens College, New York. He received his J.D. from the University of Miami School of Law in 1978. He lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico with his wife Gail. They have two children, Hartley and Jamie.
Program video
The Jewish Artist
Sunday, May 1, 7:00 pm EDT
(online in partnership with the Orange County Jewish Community Scholar Program)
Is there Jewish art? Is there a unique way in which a Jewish artist thinks visually? What do Jewish artists share? How can we identify the Jewish lens through which we view what we encounter? How has this interpretive perspective changed over the generations? How does it change over our own journey this year? Among the artists examined are Pissaro, Modigliani, Chagall, Soutine, Mark Rothko, Eva Hesse, Mierle Ukeles, Deborah Kass, and a range of contemporary Israeli painters.
Our speaker, Tobi Kahn, is a painter and sculptor whose work has been the subject in over 70 solo museum exhibitions since he was selected as one of nine artists to be included in the 1985 Guggenheim Museum exhibition, New Horizons in American Art. Kahn’s most recent solo exhibition, FORMATION: Images of the Body, opened virtually in December, 2020 at the Henry Luce III Center for Art and Religion at Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, D.C. Works by Kahn are in major museum, hospital, sacred/interfaith spaces, corporate, and private collections. For close to four decades, Kahn has been steadfast in the pursuit of his distinct vision and persistent in his commitment to the redemptive possibilities of art. In paint, stone, and bronze, he has explored the correspondence between the intimate and monumental. While his early works drew on the tradition of American Romantic landscape painting, his more recent pieces reflect his fascination with contemporary science, inspired by the micro-images of cell formations, the environment and satellite photography. For over four decades, he has taught fine arts workshops at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. He also designed the art curriculum for several high schools in the New York area and co-founded and facilitates the Artists’ Beit Midrash at the Streicker Center of Temple Emanu-El. Kahn lectures extensively at universities and public forums internationally on the importance of visual language and art as healing. Kahn received his BA in Photography and Printmaking from Hunter and an MFA in Painting and Sculpture from Pratt Institute. This program is fully funded by a grant from the Jewish Community Foundation Orange County.
Program video
COMMUNITY PROGRAMS
The U.S. and Israel: The Ties That Bind Us
Monday, May 2, 7:30 pm EDT
(online program presented by the Lappin Foundation)
The Walnut Street Synagogue is pleased to be a co-sponsor of the “The U.S. and Israel: The Ties That Bind Us” program, presented by the Lappin Foundation. Israel and the United States are very different, in size, culture, politics and history. Yet, despite this great asymmetry, the two countries developed a unique and solid partnership that has become the subject of diplomatic and academic fascination. Join us for a presentation by Ido Aharoni, Global Distinguished Professor at New York University’s Program of International Relations in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.
The U.S. and Israel – The Ties That Bind Us (Event flyer)
19th Annual Connie Spear Birnbaum Memorial Lecture
Sunday, May 1, 5:00 pm EDT
(in person and online program presented by the Synagogue Council of Massachusetts)
The Walnut Street Synagogue is pleased to be a sponsor of 19th Annual Connie Spear Birnbaum Memorial Lecture that will be held in person at Congregation Beth El-Atereth Israel in Newton Centre and online. The featured keynote speaker will be Major General (Ret.) Amos Yaldin on the subject “A New Middle East? Israel After the Abraham Accords.”
At a Crossroads: Preserving the Truth
Virtual Community Holocaust Commemoration of Yom Hashoah
Sunday, May 1, 2:00 pm EDT
(online program presented by the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Boston)
This year’s community commemoration of Yom Hashoah will be online and will feature community speakers including Boston Mayor Michelle Wu, Ambassador Meron Reuben, Consul General of Israel to New England, local Holocaust survivor Frieda Grayzel and others.
Program video
COMMUNITY PROJECTS
Ukraine Emergency Fund
Combined Jewish Philanthropies (CJP) has launched the Ukraine Emergency Fund to provide humanitarian assistance to the Jewish Community of Ukraine. All funds will go to partners on the ground in Ukraine to help with food, housing, medicine and other basic needs.
Learn more and Donate here
Chelsea Gateway Project
Yad Chessed
Sponsor meals for those in our community who are struggling with economic hardship and isolation and help to support other needs through Yad Chessed. Yad Chessed serves as a safety net for Jewish individuals and families and is rooted in the Jewish values of kindness (chessed) and charity (tzedakah). They are committed to helping those in need navigate a path toward financial stability while preserving their privacy and dignity. Questions can be directed to info@yadchessed.org.
Support Yad Chessed