Naomi Weintraub: Disloyal is a podcast committed to a broad representation of thought ideas and creative imaginings. The opinions expressed by guests on this podcast do not necessarily represent the opinions of the staff management board or volunteers of the Jewish Museum of Maryland.
Leora Fridman: As artists, we are standing on the shoulders of our prophet ancestors, of our rabbi ancestors, our ritualists ancestors among many others. And we are not doing something outside of or in contradiction with what they have done. We're kind of following amongst them, amidst them. And I think that that is really a foundational idea for me in terms of why I think it's important to highlight Jewish contemporary art because it's so deeply in relationship with the histories of Jewish invention. I also think that specifically artists today in a time of such tremendous fear and pressure, I think that artists have an incredible amount of insight and prophecy to offer to offer to Jewish communities, but also I think beyond Jewish communities.
Naomi Weintraub: Welcome to Disloyal, a podcast from the Jewish Museum of Maryland. I'm Naomi Weintraub, Community Artist-in-Residence here at the Jewish Museum of Maryland, and the new co-host for the Disloyal podcast. And I'm here with my co-host, Mark Gunnery, Director of Communications and Content for the museum. Mark, how are you doing?
Mark Gunnery: I'm doing good, Naomi. I'm happy to be back behind the mic and glad to have you as a new co-host. For people who don't know, Naomi was a production assistant on our first series of shows, which covered our exhibit A Fence Around the Torah and is now going to be taking more of a lead in production and co-hosting. So stay tuned over the next coming months to hear more conversations with Naomi. So Naomi.
Naomi Weintraub: So Mark.
Mark Gunnery: We've been on a bit of a production break over the past few months, but over that time we've been staying busy at the museum. We've been helping with exhibits, organizing and throwing events, working on public art projects, making videos, and yeah, just doing a lot. And one thing we've been doing is recording brand new Disloyal episodes that we are excited to start releasing. Naomi, can you tell us about some of the episodes we've got coming up?
Naomi Weintraub: For sure. We've got so many good ones coming up. One that I'm really excited about is a conversation with some of the people behind the Radical Jewish Calendar, a project that creates an annual calendar filled with art, astrological happenings, holidays in political history. We also have a series of episodes inspired by our recent exhibit Blacklist: The Hollywood Red Scare, an exhibit that was created by and on loan to us from Jewish Museum Milwaukee. Blacklist tells the story of the Hollywood Red Scare when actors, screenwriters, directors, and others were banned from working in the mid 20th century film industry, because they were suspected of being communist or communist sympathizers. And we have shows coming up that reflect on that history and its current implications, including an episode on the cinema of the Red Scare era, including how genre films like war and sci-fi movies reflected social and racial anxieties of the time. And an episode on how the Red Scare affected workers in Baltimore, including Jewish communists. What else do we have coming up, Mark?
Mark Gunnery: So much, Naomi, like an episode about growing up in the radical left underground of the seventies and eighties, one exploring some of the visual collections in the Lesbian Herstory archives, some episodes on music and so much more. And in addition to having Naomi on as co-host, Disloyal is also coming back to you with some other changes. A big one is that we're not going to be a weekly podcast anymore. We are going to release episodes when we're ready to release them. So you might have to wait a few weeks in between episodes, but trust me, they'll be worth it. And also, we want to be a little bit more experimental with the format of the podcast. We'll be inviting other Jewish Museum of Maryland employees behind the mic, for example, and we'll be playing around more with music and sound. And today we have a really great episode. Who are we talking to today, Naomi?
Naomi Weintraub: Today we're talking to the JMM's Curator-in-Residence Leora Fridman about our new exhibit Material/Inheritance Contemporary Work by New Jewish Culture Fellows. The show features 30 artists whose work has been supported by the New Jewish Culture Fellowship or NJCF, a national arts fellowship that advances the work of groundbreaking Jewish artists. The 30 artists featured in Material/Inheritance emphasize resilience and are inspired by ancestral Jewish texts, practices, histories, and griefs. Material/Inheritance opens Sunday, March 26th with an amazing day of performances that feature performers like Julia Elsas, Liat Berdugo, Rosza Daniel Lang/Levitsky, and Ira Khonen Temple. If you want to come to the opening, you can register for free tickets jewishmuseumMD.org. And if you want to learn more about the exhibit, visit MaterialInheritance.com. The exhibit runs through June 11th, 2023, by the way. So without further ado, here's our conversation with writer educator new Jewish Culture fellow and JMM Curator-in-Residence Leora Fridman about the exhibit she curated, Material/Inheritance: Contemporary Work by New Jewish Culture Fellows.
Mark Gunnery: Leora Fridman, thank you so much for joining us on Disloyal.
Leora Fridman: Thank you so much. I'm really happy to be here.
Mark Gunnery: So Leora, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got involved with this project?
Leora Fridman: Yeah, so my primary identities are as a writer, an educator, and a curator. I write primarily about bodies, illness, disability, politics, and art. So all of that already is many things. I also write very inter genre work. I write between nonfiction, fiction, essay, poems, criticism, and as committed as I am to working between genres and writing. I also am committed to working between people. I work a lot in collaboration, even in my writing, I write a lot about and with other people's art, other people's performance, other people's activism. And from that kind of collaborative standpoint, curation tends to come pretty naturally, meaning most of the work that I do in writing and otherwise is kind of about bringing people together, bringing people's work together, trying to make conversations happen. Part of that also comes from kind of a personal ethic about not believing in art being made alone or being made without any influences or relationships or supports. And that ethic kind of guides a lot of what I do. So that is about me.
I got involved in this project first because I got involved in the New Jewish Culture Fellowship, otherwise known as NJCF. I got involved in the fellowship when I started writing my first kind of more explicitly Jewish book. And that book was a lot about embodied interactions with Jewish inherited trauma, specifically thinking through my own desires, especially for playfulness. That came up when I was working as an American born Jew in Germany. And playing with and kind of poking fun at the victim/oppressor binary is one way that I talk about it, especially after many years. I had been living for many years in Oakland, California and had spent a bunch of time as a white ally to black led movements. And in those situations it was very clear to me that my identity as a white Jew put me on the potential oppressor side of things.
But then when I was working in Germany, I noticed how quickly people interacted with me as a victim and kind of stamped me with the identity of victim. So anyway, I was writing that book. When I was doing that in Berlin, I happened to meet Maia Ipp, who's the co-founder of NJCF, and she encouraged me to apply to a fellowship. I have found it to be a really incredible and supportive community for my own work and for my interest in bringing other people together. And then when the opportunity to partner with the Jewish Museum of Maryland came along, I think I was an easy emissary as someone who was already a member of the NJCF Network and knows a lot of people's work in that and also had curatorial experience and had experience working with museums.
Naomi Weintraub: So what is the New Jewish Culture Fellowship and what does being a New Jewish Culture fellow mean?
Leora Fridman: Yeah, so the fellowship provides both monetary and communal support to contemporary Jewish artists. Those artists are accepted in yearly cohorts, meaning like you're accepted for essentially one school year at a time. And the artists are granted financial resources for a particular project. And then in addition to that monetary support, the cohorts meet regularly throughout the year to discuss things that are coming up in their work. Those kind of emerge from that particular group and their work, but often include the role of politics in their work, the forms that they're working in, the role of Jewish identity and Jewish conversations in their work, how they're seeking to grow as artists, et cetera. There are not any particular constraints around what exactly the work or the art has to be for NJCF, especially as organizations go.
It's an especially interdisciplinary organization. People do all sorts of different kinds of work. I would also say unusually for an art supporting organization, it's one that is really invested in the process of people's work. There are lots of places that support presentation, that support the outcomes, and NJCF I think is particularly good at and invested in supporting the process of art making. And then also in line with, I would say the Jewish spirit of the organization. The discussions that happen between cohorts and the way that NJCF thinks about itself tends to be a lot about kind of wrestling with questions, wrestling with processes, wrestling with the unknown, wrestling with the confusing and complex aspects of leading an artistic career as opposed to having answers or completing those questions. And that's the spirit that I especially admire about it.
Mark Gunnery: Will you tell us about this exhibit Material/Inheritance Contemporary Work by New Jewish Culture Fellows? What are some of the ideas guiding the show and what are some of the themes of it?
Leora Fridman: So this show itself, as you might imagine, we're talking about the show as a New Jewish Culture Fellowship show and exhibition. So the idea is essentially to showcase the work of people who have made work and collaborated as part of NJCF. So in a lot of ways we had to think about this exhibition as an exhibition plus, like it's an exhibition plus performances, an exhibition plus a kind of gathering of community, exhibition plus many other kinds of modes, especially because a lot of the people, as I mentioned earlier, work across disciplines and a lot of their work is not necessarily work that kind of traditionally sits on a wall in a gallery. So a lot of the work of this show thus far has been thinking about how we can actually capture some of that work and how we can present it. Well, there are a lot of different types of freedom that I'm trying to make available to the artists in this show, both in terms of how they're thinking about their disciplines and within the framework of the Feldman Gallery at the JMM, freedom in terms of how they want to install it, how they wanted people in to interact with the work, etc.
But I think as a curator, you always have to walk that kind of fine line between giving artists freedom and making sure that the place where their work is being shown can accommodate it, the museum actually physically fit what they want to do, et cetera. So that's been a lot of the process of figuring out this show in terms of what it entails. I've been thinking lately a lot about the work in this show as thinking about survival and how does it mean to survive, but not just to kind of survive by the skin of our teeth to survive in kind of abundant, creative, inventive artist driven ways. And certainly there are many preexisting Jewish narratives about survival. Well, some of those preexisting narratives exist and inhabit space in the work in this show. But those preexisting narratives I think are also really built upon by the way that artists here are considering what it means to survive a contemporary context.
I mean, thinking about massive climate shifts, political uprisings, public health concerns, etc. And I think a lot of the artists in the show are really thinking about how can we stay creative within these very pressing and sometimes terrifying conditions? How can we survive those? How can we stay awake inside of those? How can we build relationship that sustains us inside of those and how can we have joy inside of those? I think that there's a lot of interest in this show in joy and humor and in thinking about how we can have joy while acknowledging the sort of complexities, difficulties, fears of contemporary life and some of the specifics of what that means. There's subject matter in the show about, as I mentioned, relationship about chosen family, bio family, and trans identities, sexuality, embodiment, fertility and reproduction, diaspora and home ritual activism. And again, all of these themes are being addressed in the unique ways that particular artist addresses them. But also we can start to see as we look at different pieces in the show, really how much there are relationships between the way that different artists are concerning themselves with these themes and also how kind of threads of Jewish foundations run underneath and between within those unique artistic ways of considering those themes.
Naomi Weintraub: Leora, the more you're sharing about the show, the more the excitement in me is growing because I can just tell that this show is going to be very powerful for not only the Jewish Museum of Maryland, but the Jewish arts community globally. So why do you think that it's important to highlight contemporary Jewish art?
Leora Fridman: I've been wanting to draw attention with this exhibit and specifically with this question to an essay by NJCF co-founder Maia Ipp, called Kaddish for an Unborn Avant-garde, an essay that she wrote in 2019 and has been passed around a bit since then. And I bring it up because in that essay, one of the many things that Maia talks about is about the artist as a inheritor and a generator of Jewish prophetic traditions. So there are a lot of ways that could be interpreted, but I take it to mean that as artists, we are standing on the shoulders of our prophet ancestors, of our rabbi ancestors, our ritualist ancestors among many others. And we are not doing something outside of or in contradiction with what they have done or kind of following amongst them, amidst them. And I think that that is really a foundational idea for me in terms of why I think it's important to highlight Jewish contemporary art because it's so deeply in relationship with the histories of Jewish invention.
I also think that specifically artists today in a time of such tremendous fear and pressure, I think that artists have an incredible amount of insight and prophecy to offer to Jewish communities, but also I think beyond Jewish communities. And I want to offer one other thought too about why highlighting contemporary Jewish art, because I think part of my interest and in my own journey to curating such an identity driven show is leaning on experiences that I've had working in affinity groups in organizing context and activist context. If you're not already familiar with that, with what that means, meaning means kind of breaking out into the different groups within an addition, within a given meeting or gathering to which you have affinity. And when I've been in those contexts, it's often in, for me, post occupy, Black-led movements for liberation. And so we're considering what are the affinity groups that we want to break into in order to best organize, in order to best build power?
And I think those experiences really led me to consider the amount of work that could be done from drawing on my own inheritance. We see that word that keeps cropping up here, but drawing on my own relationships to power my own relationships, to art my own relationships, to what has come before me, to the stories I've been told in part in order to stave off the dangers of cultural appropriation, especially in terms of art making, but also in terms of really thinking about what's mine to work with. And that's again, not to isolate myself from other groups and other kinds of identities, but to really work from Jewishness as the ground and foundation that's been handed down to me specifically and turning away from I think the forces of assimilation that invite us to erase those identities that invite us to consider ourselves unidentifiable, which I think also leads us to be more likely to be kind of wavering in the wind of different systems of power as opposed to really grounding ourselves in our own values. So those are a few different ways that I'm thinking about it.
Mark Gunnery: So in addition to all the pieces that are going to be in the gallery, there are also going to be performances on the opening and closing days and a couple other extra things. Can you talk about what some of those performances are going to be and any other pieces from the show that you'd like to highlight?
Leora Fridman: Yeah, absolutely. I would say that I probably want to highlight everything, so it's hard to pick, but I'll talk about some of the performances that are coming up. For the openings specifically, we're having multi-part extravaganza we could say of performances on the opening. On March 26th, we'll be having Julia Elsas, who's a sculptor, performing with several collaborators on a series of ceramic instruments that are both part of the exhibition and being utilized for this performance. And they're ceramic instruments that are a re-imagination of the ugav, the re-imagination of a sort of mythical biblical instrument. So that's one performance that we'll be having. We are going to be having a performative lecture from Liat Berdugo thinking about the role of trees in Israel and Palestine, which also relates with a piece of work that she also has in the exhibition. So again, you can notice that we're kind of trying to activate work that is in the exhibition itself and find ways to bring kind of live understandings of that work delivered by the artists to the audiences, and hopefully also encouraging people who are in attendance at these events to consider their own ways of engaging with the work that's in the gallery.
In addition to that, we're going to have Rosza Daniel Lang/Levitzky, also activating an installation in the gallery that's about the cultural history of Yiddish song. And following that we'll have Ira Temple and additional collaborators performing a live concert about gender and about transferring works for Jewish adulthood. So those are just the opening events that we're going to be having. There's lots more to look forward to, but maybe I'll stop there for now.
Naomi Weintraub: So I'm wondering why do this show at a Jewish museum rather than say a gallery or a non-Jewish art museum?
Leora Fridman: This connects to what I was saying earlier about my own faith in the role of the artists and Jewish community in the sense that I'm really invested in encouraging Jewish institutions and organizations to look to artists as collaborators in the ongoing development of Jewish community. Of course, I hope that many different types of people are going to see this exhibition and be drawn to it, but one group I'm hoping will definitely see it is Jewish people who don't necessarily know about the vibrancy of contemporary Jewish art or don't necessarily think to look to artists as collaborators in community building as builders of community. And the space of the Jewish Museum in the case of this exhibition, I think gives us more access to those people and for those people to interact with the work. So that's one reason among many.
Mark Gunnery: So we're starting to wrap up here, but before we go, can you tell us why you wanted to call this exhibit Material/Inheritance?
Leora Fridman: There's so many ways, especially as a writer, that I can think forever about two different words, and we placed them against one another. So one thing I started thinking about when I first started thinking about the name for this exhibition was how could we find two words upon which there were many different interpretations upon which there were many different iterations that we could have, but essentially the way that I see this title is thinking about the question of what material. We have material that comes from our inheritance, material that we have inherited, material that we can use for our creative work, for our lives if we don't necessarily think about them already as involving creative work. And I also think that Jewish inheritance itself, at least for me, can be very material. It can be very physical, it can be very grounding, even it can also be super heavy and stifling, not always, but it can. And so in placing these two words, Material/Inheritance next to each other and thinking about even when an inheritance is heavy, how can that heaviness be material? Which I think again is the wisdom of the artist, is the wisdom of seeing anything that we come across in life as material, as creative possibility.
Mark Gunnery: We've been talking with Leora Fridman, writer, educator, and Curator-in-Residence here at the Jewish Museum of Maryland. Leora Fridman is a New Jewish Culture fellow and is the curator of Material/Inheritance Contemporary work by New Jewish Culture Fellows, which is opening at the Jewish Museum of Maryland on March 26th, 2023. Leora, thanks so much for joining us on Disloyal.
Leora Fridman: Thank you for having me.
Mark Gunnery: I am so excited for Material/Inheritance. I'm so excited for the opening. The opening performances are going to be amazing. Yeah, I'm just so excited for this. I think that this is really an opportunity to see so much amazing, really relevant, contemporary and just exciting Jewish art all in one space, and I'm really happy that it's happening here at the Jewish Museum of Maryland.
Naomi Weintraub: Yeah, same. The other day, I was able to take a little peek into the exhibit space and see how it's all coming together, and it's truly inspiring and extremely exhilarating to see just a clustering of powerful, contemporary Jewish art that is taking on big questions that are some of the main themes in my art practice as well. So this exhibit has been personally really empowering for me as a young artist, so everybody should come out and see Material/Inheritance. It's open from March 26th to June 11th, 2023, and I don't see why not. This is your chance.
Mark Gunnery: There's going to be another Material/Inheritance event on May 24th when the band Levyosn will perform at the JMM. The exhibits closing day on June 11th is going to feature an installation activation by Tyler Rai in musical performances by Hadar Ahuvia, Tatyana Tenenbaum, and Laura Elkeslassy. There's also going to be a performance by Fancy Feast and Zoe Ziegfeld in New York City. More details about that coming soon. You can keep up to date on all of this MaterialInheritance.com/events. And there's also going to be a special episode of Disloyal that's part of the exhibition. On June 9th we'll release a collaborative episode with Ariel Goldberg, inspired by an exhibit they curated titled Images on Which to Build: 1970s-1990s. The episode will focus particularly on the role of Jewish lesbians involved in Brooklyn's Lesbian Herstory Archives, so stay tuned for that. We are really happy to be back. Disloyal is back.
Naomi Weintraub: Thanks to all our loyal listeners.
Mark Gunnery: Oh, okay. And please share this with anybody that you think would be interested. Please subscribe, give us a rating, do all those things that you do with a podcast because we would love more people to be hearing this.
Naomi Weintraub: See you next time.
Mark Gunnery: Thank you so much for listening to Disloyal. We hope you enjoyed the podcast and we'd love to hear your feedback. Visit DisloyalPodcast.com or send us an email to Disloyal@JewishMuseumMD.org. You can follow us on Twitter @JewishMuseumMD, or on Instagram @JewishMuseum_MD. If you're in Baltimore, come visit the JMM. Go to JewishMuseumMD.org for more information or to become a member if you're interested in supporting content like this podcast. Disloyal is a production of the Jewish Museum of Maryland, and it's produced and hosted by Mark Gunnery and Naomi Weintraub. Our executive director is Sol Davis. You can subscribe to Disloyal wherever you listen to podcasts. Until next time, take care.
Leora Fridman: As artists, we are standing on the shoulders of our prophet ancestors, of our rabbi ancestors, our ritualists ancestors among many others. And we are not doing something outside of or in contradiction with what they have done. We're kind of following amongst them, amidst them. And I think that that is really a foundational idea for me in terms of why I think it's important to highlight Jewish contemporary art because it's so deeply in relationship with the histories of Jewish invention. I also think that specifically artists today in a time of such tremendous fear and pressure, I think that artists have an incredible amount of insight and prophecy to offer to offer to Jewish communities, but also I think beyond Jewish communities.
Naomi Weintraub: Welcome to Disloyal, a podcast from the Jewish Museum of Maryland. I'm Naomi Weintraub, Community Artist-in-Residence here at the Jewish Museum of Maryland, and the new co-host for the Disloyal podcast. And I'm here with my co-host, Mark Gunnery, Director of Communications and Content for the museum. Mark, how are you doing?
Mark Gunnery: I'm doing good, Naomi. I'm happy to be back behind the mic and glad to have you as a new co-host. For people who don't know, Naomi was a production assistant on our first series of shows, which covered our exhibit A Fence Around the Torah and is now going to be taking more of a lead in production and co-hosting. So stay tuned over the next coming months to hear more conversations with Naomi. So Naomi.
Naomi Weintraub: So Mark.
Mark Gunnery: We've been on a bit of a production break over the past few months, but over that time we've been staying busy at the museum. We've been helping with exhibits, organizing and throwing events, working on public art projects, making videos, and yeah, just doing a lot. And one thing we've been doing is recording brand new Disloyal episodes that we are excited to start releasing. Naomi, can you tell us about some of the episodes we've got coming up?
Naomi Weintraub: For sure. We've got so many good ones coming up. One that I'm really excited about is a conversation with some of the people behind the Radical Jewish Calendar, a project that creates an annual calendar filled with art, astrological happenings, holidays in political history. We also have a series of episodes inspired by our recent exhibit Blacklist: The Hollywood Red Scare, an exhibit that was created by and on loan to us from Jewish Museum Milwaukee. Blacklist tells the story of the Hollywood Red Scare when actors, screenwriters, directors, and others were banned from working in the mid 20th century film industry, because they were suspected of being communist or communist sympathizers. And we have shows coming up that reflect on that history and its current implications, including an episode on the cinema of the Red Scare era, including how genre films like war and sci-fi movies reflected social and racial anxieties of the time. And an episode on how the Red Scare affected workers in Baltimore, including Jewish communists. What else do we have coming up, Mark?
Mark Gunnery: So much, Naomi, like an episode about growing up in the radical left underground of the seventies and eighties, one exploring some of the visual collections in the Lesbian Herstory archives, some episodes on music and so much more. And in addition to having Naomi on as co-host, Disloyal is also coming back to you with some other changes. A big one is that we're not going to be a weekly podcast anymore. We are going to release episodes when we're ready to release them. So you might have to wait a few weeks in between episodes, but trust me, they'll be worth it. And also, we want to be a little bit more experimental with the format of the podcast. We'll be inviting other Jewish Museum of Maryland employees behind the mic, for example, and we'll be playing around more with music and sound. And today we have a really great episode. Who are we talking to today, Naomi?
Naomi Weintraub: Today we're talking to the JMM's Curator-in-Residence Leora Fridman about our new exhibit Material/Inheritance Contemporary Work by New Jewish Culture Fellows. The show features 30 artists whose work has been supported by the New Jewish Culture Fellowship or NJCF, a national arts fellowship that advances the work of groundbreaking Jewish artists. The 30 artists featured in Material/Inheritance emphasize resilience and are inspired by ancestral Jewish texts, practices, histories, and griefs. Material/Inheritance opens Sunday, March 26th with an amazing day of performances that feature performers like Julia Elsas, Liat Berdugo, Rosza Daniel Lang/Levitsky, and Ira Khonen Temple. If you want to come to the opening, you can register for free tickets jewishmuseumMD.org. And if you want to learn more about the exhibit, visit MaterialInheritance.com. The exhibit runs through June 11th, 2023, by the way. So without further ado, here's our conversation with writer educator new Jewish Culture fellow and JMM Curator-in-Residence Leora Fridman about the exhibit she curated, Material/Inheritance: Contemporary Work by New Jewish Culture Fellows.
Mark Gunnery: Leora Fridman, thank you so much for joining us on Disloyal.
Leora Fridman: Thank you so much. I'm really happy to be here.
Mark Gunnery: So Leora, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got involved with this project?
Leora Fridman: Yeah, so my primary identities are as a writer, an educator, and a curator. I write primarily about bodies, illness, disability, politics, and art. So all of that already is many things. I also write very inter genre work. I write between nonfiction, fiction, essay, poems, criticism, and as committed as I am to working between genres and writing. I also am committed to working between people. I work a lot in collaboration, even in my writing, I write a lot about and with other people's art, other people's performance, other people's activism. And from that kind of collaborative standpoint, curation tends to come pretty naturally, meaning most of the work that I do in writing and otherwise is kind of about bringing people together, bringing people's work together, trying to make conversations happen. Part of that also comes from kind of a personal ethic about not believing in art being made alone or being made without any influences or relationships or supports. And that ethic kind of guides a lot of what I do. So that is about me.
I got involved in this project first because I got involved in the New Jewish Culture Fellowship, otherwise known as NJCF. I got involved in the fellowship when I started writing my first kind of more explicitly Jewish book. And that book was a lot about embodied interactions with Jewish inherited trauma, specifically thinking through my own desires, especially for playfulness. That came up when I was working as an American born Jew in Germany. And playing with and kind of poking fun at the victim/oppressor binary is one way that I talk about it, especially after many years. I had been living for many years in Oakland, California and had spent a bunch of time as a white ally to black led movements. And in those situations it was very clear to me that my identity as a white Jew put me on the potential oppressor side of things.
But then when I was working in Germany, I noticed how quickly people interacted with me as a victim and kind of stamped me with the identity of victim. So anyway, I was writing that book. When I was doing that in Berlin, I happened to meet Maia Ipp, who's the co-founder of NJCF, and she encouraged me to apply to a fellowship. I have found it to be a really incredible and supportive community for my own work and for my interest in bringing other people together. And then when the opportunity to partner with the Jewish Museum of Maryland came along, I think I was an easy emissary as someone who was already a member of the NJCF Network and knows a lot of people's work in that and also had curatorial experience and had experience working with museums.
Naomi Weintraub: So what is the New Jewish Culture Fellowship and what does being a New Jewish Culture fellow mean?
Leora Fridman: Yeah, so the fellowship provides both monetary and communal support to contemporary Jewish artists. Those artists are accepted in yearly cohorts, meaning like you're accepted for essentially one school year at a time. And the artists are granted financial resources for a particular project. And then in addition to that monetary support, the cohorts meet regularly throughout the year to discuss things that are coming up in their work. Those kind of emerge from that particular group and their work, but often include the role of politics in their work, the forms that they're working in, the role of Jewish identity and Jewish conversations in their work, how they're seeking to grow as artists, et cetera. There are not any particular constraints around what exactly the work or the art has to be for NJCF, especially as organizations go.
It's an especially interdisciplinary organization. People do all sorts of different kinds of work. I would also say unusually for an art supporting organization, it's one that is really invested in the process of people's work. There are lots of places that support presentation, that support the outcomes, and NJCF I think is particularly good at and invested in supporting the process of art making. And then also in line with, I would say the Jewish spirit of the organization. The discussions that happen between cohorts and the way that NJCF thinks about itself tends to be a lot about kind of wrestling with questions, wrestling with processes, wrestling with the unknown, wrestling with the confusing and complex aspects of leading an artistic career as opposed to having answers or completing those questions. And that's the spirit that I especially admire about it.
Mark Gunnery: Will you tell us about this exhibit Material/Inheritance Contemporary Work by New Jewish Culture Fellows? What are some of the ideas guiding the show and what are some of the themes of it?
Leora Fridman: So this show itself, as you might imagine, we're talking about the show as a New Jewish Culture Fellowship show and exhibition. So the idea is essentially to showcase the work of people who have made work and collaborated as part of NJCF. So in a lot of ways we had to think about this exhibition as an exhibition plus, like it's an exhibition plus performances, an exhibition plus a kind of gathering of community, exhibition plus many other kinds of modes, especially because a lot of the people, as I mentioned earlier, work across disciplines and a lot of their work is not necessarily work that kind of traditionally sits on a wall in a gallery. So a lot of the work of this show thus far has been thinking about how we can actually capture some of that work and how we can present it. Well, there are a lot of different types of freedom that I'm trying to make available to the artists in this show, both in terms of how they're thinking about their disciplines and within the framework of the Feldman Gallery at the JMM, freedom in terms of how they want to install it, how they wanted people in to interact with the work, etc.
But I think as a curator, you always have to walk that kind of fine line between giving artists freedom and making sure that the place where their work is being shown can accommodate it, the museum actually physically fit what they want to do, et cetera. So that's been a lot of the process of figuring out this show in terms of what it entails. I've been thinking lately a lot about the work in this show as thinking about survival and how does it mean to survive, but not just to kind of survive by the skin of our teeth to survive in kind of abundant, creative, inventive artist driven ways. And certainly there are many preexisting Jewish narratives about survival. Well, some of those preexisting narratives exist and inhabit space in the work in this show. But those preexisting narratives I think are also really built upon by the way that artists here are considering what it means to survive a contemporary context.
I mean, thinking about massive climate shifts, political uprisings, public health concerns, etc. And I think a lot of the artists in the show are really thinking about how can we stay creative within these very pressing and sometimes terrifying conditions? How can we survive those? How can we stay awake inside of those? How can we build relationship that sustains us inside of those and how can we have joy inside of those? I think that there's a lot of interest in this show in joy and humor and in thinking about how we can have joy while acknowledging the sort of complexities, difficulties, fears of contemporary life and some of the specifics of what that means. There's subject matter in the show about, as I mentioned, relationship about chosen family, bio family, and trans identities, sexuality, embodiment, fertility and reproduction, diaspora and home ritual activism. And again, all of these themes are being addressed in the unique ways that particular artist addresses them. But also we can start to see as we look at different pieces in the show, really how much there are relationships between the way that different artists are concerning themselves with these themes and also how kind of threads of Jewish foundations run underneath and between within those unique artistic ways of considering those themes.
Naomi Weintraub: Leora, the more you're sharing about the show, the more the excitement in me is growing because I can just tell that this show is going to be very powerful for not only the Jewish Museum of Maryland, but the Jewish arts community globally. So why do you think that it's important to highlight contemporary Jewish art?
Leora Fridman: I've been wanting to draw attention with this exhibit and specifically with this question to an essay by NJCF co-founder Maia Ipp, called Kaddish for an Unborn Avant-garde, an essay that she wrote in 2019 and has been passed around a bit since then. And I bring it up because in that essay, one of the many things that Maia talks about is about the artist as a inheritor and a generator of Jewish prophetic traditions. So there are a lot of ways that could be interpreted, but I take it to mean that as artists, we are standing on the shoulders of our prophet ancestors, of our rabbi ancestors, our ritualist ancestors among many others. And we are not doing something outside of or in contradiction with what they have done or kind of following amongst them, amidst them. And I think that that is really a foundational idea for me in terms of why I think it's important to highlight Jewish contemporary art because it's so deeply in relationship with the histories of Jewish invention.
I also think that specifically artists today in a time of such tremendous fear and pressure, I think that artists have an incredible amount of insight and prophecy to offer to Jewish communities, but also I think beyond Jewish communities. And I want to offer one other thought too about why highlighting contemporary Jewish art, because I think part of my interest and in my own journey to curating such an identity driven show is leaning on experiences that I've had working in affinity groups in organizing context and activist context. If you're not already familiar with that, with what that means, meaning means kind of breaking out into the different groups within an addition, within a given meeting or gathering to which you have affinity. And when I've been in those contexts, it's often in, for me, post occupy, Black-led movements for liberation. And so we're considering what are the affinity groups that we want to break into in order to best organize, in order to best build power?
And I think those experiences really led me to consider the amount of work that could be done from drawing on my own inheritance. We see that word that keeps cropping up here, but drawing on my own relationships to power my own relationships, to art my own relationships, to what has come before me, to the stories I've been told in part in order to stave off the dangers of cultural appropriation, especially in terms of art making, but also in terms of really thinking about what's mine to work with. And that's again, not to isolate myself from other groups and other kinds of identities, but to really work from Jewishness as the ground and foundation that's been handed down to me specifically and turning away from I think the forces of assimilation that invite us to erase those identities that invite us to consider ourselves unidentifiable, which I think also leads us to be more likely to be kind of wavering in the wind of different systems of power as opposed to really grounding ourselves in our own values. So those are a few different ways that I'm thinking about it.
Mark Gunnery: So in addition to all the pieces that are going to be in the gallery, there are also going to be performances on the opening and closing days and a couple other extra things. Can you talk about what some of those performances are going to be and any other pieces from the show that you'd like to highlight?
Leora Fridman: Yeah, absolutely. I would say that I probably want to highlight everything, so it's hard to pick, but I'll talk about some of the performances that are coming up. For the openings specifically, we're having multi-part extravaganza we could say of performances on the opening. On March 26th, we'll be having Julia Elsas, who's a sculptor, performing with several collaborators on a series of ceramic instruments that are both part of the exhibition and being utilized for this performance. And they're ceramic instruments that are a re-imagination of the ugav, the re-imagination of a sort of mythical biblical instrument. So that's one performance that we'll be having. We are going to be having a performative lecture from Liat Berdugo thinking about the role of trees in Israel and Palestine, which also relates with a piece of work that she also has in the exhibition. So again, you can notice that we're kind of trying to activate work that is in the exhibition itself and find ways to bring kind of live understandings of that work delivered by the artists to the audiences, and hopefully also encouraging people who are in attendance at these events to consider their own ways of engaging with the work that's in the gallery.
In addition to that, we're going to have Rosza Daniel Lang/Levitzky, also activating an installation in the gallery that's about the cultural history of Yiddish song. And following that we'll have Ira Temple and additional collaborators performing a live concert about gender and about transferring works for Jewish adulthood. So those are just the opening events that we're going to be having. There's lots more to look forward to, but maybe I'll stop there for now.
Naomi Weintraub: So I'm wondering why do this show at a Jewish museum rather than say a gallery or a non-Jewish art museum?
Leora Fridman: This connects to what I was saying earlier about my own faith in the role of the artists and Jewish community in the sense that I'm really invested in encouraging Jewish institutions and organizations to look to artists as collaborators in the ongoing development of Jewish community. Of course, I hope that many different types of people are going to see this exhibition and be drawn to it, but one group I'm hoping will definitely see it is Jewish people who don't necessarily know about the vibrancy of contemporary Jewish art or don't necessarily think to look to artists as collaborators in community building as builders of community. And the space of the Jewish Museum in the case of this exhibition, I think gives us more access to those people and for those people to interact with the work. So that's one reason among many.
Mark Gunnery: So we're starting to wrap up here, but before we go, can you tell us why you wanted to call this exhibit Material/Inheritance?
Leora Fridman: There's so many ways, especially as a writer, that I can think forever about two different words, and we placed them against one another. So one thing I started thinking about when I first started thinking about the name for this exhibition was how could we find two words upon which there were many different interpretations upon which there were many different iterations that we could have, but essentially the way that I see this title is thinking about the question of what material. We have material that comes from our inheritance, material that we have inherited, material that we can use for our creative work, for our lives if we don't necessarily think about them already as involving creative work. And I also think that Jewish inheritance itself, at least for me, can be very material. It can be very physical, it can be very grounding, even it can also be super heavy and stifling, not always, but it can. And so in placing these two words, Material/Inheritance next to each other and thinking about even when an inheritance is heavy, how can that heaviness be material? Which I think again is the wisdom of the artist, is the wisdom of seeing anything that we come across in life as material, as creative possibility.
Mark Gunnery: We've been talking with Leora Fridman, writer, educator, and Curator-in-Residence here at the Jewish Museum of Maryland. Leora Fridman is a New Jewish Culture fellow and is the curator of Material/Inheritance Contemporary work by New Jewish Culture Fellows, which is opening at the Jewish Museum of Maryland on March 26th, 2023. Leora, thanks so much for joining us on Disloyal.
Leora Fridman: Thank you for having me.
Mark Gunnery: I am so excited for Material/Inheritance. I'm so excited for the opening. The opening performances are going to be amazing. Yeah, I'm just so excited for this. I think that this is really an opportunity to see so much amazing, really relevant, contemporary and just exciting Jewish art all in one space, and I'm really happy that it's happening here at the Jewish Museum of Maryland.
Naomi Weintraub: Yeah, same. The other day, I was able to take a little peek into the exhibit space and see how it's all coming together, and it's truly inspiring and extremely exhilarating to see just a clustering of powerful, contemporary Jewish art that is taking on big questions that are some of the main themes in my art practice as well. So this exhibit has been personally really empowering for me as a young artist, so everybody should come out and see Material/Inheritance. It's open from March 26th to June 11th, 2023, and I don't see why not. This is your chance.
Mark Gunnery: There's going to be another Material/Inheritance event on May 24th when the band Levyosn will perform at the JMM. The exhibits closing day on June 11th is going to feature an installation activation by Tyler Rai in musical performances by Hadar Ahuvia, Tatyana Tenenbaum, and Laura Elkeslassy. There's also going to be a performance by Fancy Feast and Zoe Ziegfeld in New York City. More details about that coming soon. You can keep up to date on all of this MaterialInheritance.com/events. And there's also going to be a special episode of Disloyal that's part of the exhibition. On June 9th we'll release a collaborative episode with Ariel Goldberg, inspired by an exhibit they curated titled Images on Which to Build: 1970s-1990s. The episode will focus particularly on the role of Jewish lesbians involved in Brooklyn's Lesbian Herstory Archives, so stay tuned for that. We are really happy to be back. Disloyal is back.
Naomi Weintraub: Thanks to all our loyal listeners.
Mark Gunnery: Oh, okay. And please share this with anybody that you think would be interested. Please subscribe, give us a rating, do all those things that you do with a podcast because we would love more people to be hearing this.
Naomi Weintraub: See you next time.
Mark Gunnery: Thank you so much for listening to Disloyal. We hope you enjoyed the podcast and we'd love to hear your feedback. Visit DisloyalPodcast.com or send us an email to Disloyal@JewishMuseumMD.org. You can follow us on Twitter @JewishMuseumMD, or on Instagram @JewishMuseum_MD. If you're in Baltimore, come visit the JMM. Go to JewishMuseumMD.org for more information or to become a member if you're interested in supporting content like this podcast. Disloyal is a production of the Jewish Museum of Maryland, and it's produced and hosted by Mark Gunnery and Naomi Weintraub. Our executive director is Sol Davis. You can subscribe to Disloyal wherever you listen to podcasts. Until next time, take care.
