Arts Blog

By Jenni Person, Artistic Director, The Open Tent

Seder As Art 2010 – What a wonderful gallery walk night – lucky us! Lots of people came out after two frozen/rained out months of gallery walks.

All the artists involved took risks. Michael Pertnoy’s video installation on a Darfuri exile going from Egypt to Israel challenged by stepping out of Jewish experience as the Maggid (the telling part of the seder), to parallel and investigate Jewish experience…as well as responsibility – with the central theme being that we have to remember that we were once slaves in Egypt and therefore not supposed to allow oppression to exist anywhere.

Photographer Tomas Loewy stepped away from his original plan to include prints and opted for what he called a visual installation, a looped slideshow of hundreds of appropriated images of all things Passover – from kids books to ritual items through time, to propaganda, and appropriated text applied to the wall like a frame to the slideshow with questions and research about Passover. The piece was called What Is The Haggadah Anyway? And Loewy said his seder element was the Haggadah – but it elicited thoughts about the Four Questions. Traditionally its role is as a big deal  for the youngest – and all the depth and profound meaning and pedagogy behind that. But in fact it is the keystone of the Seder – it’s all about asking questions, with  ”why is this night different from all other nights?”sSimply being  the tip of the iceberg. I had a theatre teacher in college who used to always ask that question – jokingly referring to Passover, but referring to why we were on stage or why the audience was at the theatre that night, etc. It’s definitely something I still measure by in all my work.

Deb Sherman’s theatre piece was  humorous and engaging. She created Exodus Abridged suggesting  something antithetical to traditional seders that can go all night. What are you left with when you shorthand it?

Layered literally as expertly executed collage and mixed media , Toby Needler’s piece was incredible.– folding in images and language. Images of plagues from the Sarajevo Haggadah (which itself survived such plagues as the Inquisition and the Holocaust) make up a seder plate which is surrounded by contemporary challenges – or plagues. The idea of plagues and a plagued artifact making up the seder plate itself somewhat begs the question of why would you want plagues so close, in fact holding, that which you eat? There is a superstition among some Jews that teaches that it is very important not to lick the wine off your finger after using it to make drops of wine (representing blood) for each plague or you will eat the plagues. This reminds me of that.

Conceptual artist Stuart Sheldon’s piece was a joy. Creating a surface from about 20 matzah boxes, he framed a giant egg in celebration of the unanswered, ubiquitous egg.

The egg is the only thing on the seder plate that is not explained or even discussed in the Haggadah – leaving it to be pondered freeform – even the pondering of whether or not to ponder. It is said that it’s about spring and renewal, pagan remnants that also make it central in Easter, the cycle of life, round like the world, and then there are those who pass on the meaning

By Jenni Person, Artistic Director, The Open Tent

During last Passover 2009, Arts Inside The Open Tent presented an alternative, creative Passover Seder as Art, promoting alternative access to the Passover experience. In conjunction with its exhibition, Growing Up Comix: JT Waldman, in partnership with Art Center/South Florida, the Seder As Art tied-in the graphic novelist’s piece Four Children, originally commissioned by Nextbook, while engaging artists in a variety of media (performing, media and visual arts) with their own interpretations of parts of the Haggadah. Participating artists were Kevin Arrow Andrea Askowitz, Hannah Lasky, Zammy Migdal, Rhonda Mitrani, Carmel Ophir & Howard Davis, and JT Waldman.

Seder As Art stood out as a successful interdisciplinary art experience not only because it relied on the intermix of a variety of disciplines, but also because of its play between art and audience – an experiential reinterpretation of tradition. The project served as a virtual aesthetic Seder which took guests (otherwise known as on Second Saturday gallery night art enthusiasts prowling the Design District’s offerings) through aspects of the traditional Passover Seder from the memory and nostalgia referenced in a mixed-media installation, My Matzo by Zammy Migdal to through a literal figurative print of a halo-ed Elijah by Hannah Lasky. Like an actual Seder, the project prodded and struck deep to provoke questions and stirred guests to examine contemporary issues in the face of the historical story of the journey from the narrow place of oppression to redemption.

In addition to Waldman’s piece, the project included Four Questions, a video installation by Rhonda Mitrani that juxtaposed text, sound, and video footage to question if the contemporary condition of media image bombardment numbs us to the fact that the same issues of oppression still exist.

Kevin Arrow’s Untitled (Recipe Box) was to the naked eye purely nostalgia as an installation of a wooden recipe box out of which he pulled and arranged mostly handwritten recipes for standard Ashkenazi Jewish recipes such as stuffed cabbage, matzah brei and brisket. His artist statement connected it to memories of his grandmother’s cooking and stories of another life in an Odessa shtetl surviving Cossack rampages. The very image of the balabusta, a Yiddish term of endearment and praise for a skilled Jewish homemaker (the literal translation is “master of the house”), in the kitchen of Arrow’s more upwardly mobile American childhood ably and abundantly providing for two generations of family served as a strong symbol of redemption. As the producer of this project I was fortunate to also hear another story of redemption. Arrow spoke of his acquisition of the box, discovered amongst a gutter full of discards. As he perused the refuse he came across hand-notated books and such treasures that it seemed someone else perceived of as trash. Thankfully Arrow redeemed some books, including cookbooks and the recipe box from annihilation giving it a new life amongst his own palette and in our installation.

By Jenni Person, Artistic Director, The Open Tent

Welcome to the first installment of my Jewish arts blog. So, what’s Jewish about Jewish art? And what constitutes a Jewish story? I sit here, surrounded by cats, a sleeping kid, and my beloved tapping away at his own keyboard as he puts his finishing touches on one of the pieces he is submitting for our November 7 performance of Lip Schtick: Jewish Stories from some of Miami’s most loud-mouthed Jews (and their friends!). When I first approached Andrea Askowitz of Lip Service, an organization that produces the secular version regularly at Books & Books in Coral Gables, about partnering up to create Lip Schtick, I did so with the goal of celebrating fresh voices and alternative perspectives on Jewish identity. From the get-go this project was about throwing open the doors so widely as to embrace a supreme spectrum of definitions of identity and story. And such is the place from which we work at The Open Tent with our Arts mission of: The Open Tent presents performance, visual, literary, and media arts programs rooted in Jewish identity, tradition, practice, culture and/or text.

Last year I was fortunate to be invited by the Foundation for Jewish Culture to participate in a think-tank for New Jewish Music as they embark on building a music program at the Foundation. Surrounded by some of our generation’s most significant Jewish musicians at a retreat center in upstate New York, I was intrigued by the bold words of conductor and academic Leon Botstein claiming that “there is no such thing as Jewish music, only music made by Jews.” And while I humbly disagree with this statement from such a leader, I did agree with his urging that not any one thing is Jewish music – mainly because I think Jewish music, just as Jewish culture in general, can and needs to be many things – just as diverse as Jews ourselves.

To me, Jewish culture is broad and sweeping, defined by association just as in our mission. It is culture that in some way touches on or is influenced by any or all elements of what Jewish is. So, whether it’s Lip Schtick or Seder As Art or Klezmer revivalist Frank London jamming with a salsa band in Flamingo Park where generations earlier my grandparents kibitzed in Yiddish with other snow-bird socialists, it’s Jewish art to me. But ultimately, it’s perhaps a fluid and amorphous experience that touches different people in different ways. Because there’s more than one way to be Jewish, there’s more than one way to be Jewish art. And there’s way more than one Jewish story.