A collaboration between two curators — Martin Rosenberg, a professor of art at Rutgers-Camden, and J. Susan Isaacs, a professor of art history at Towson University — has produced Visions of Place: Complex Geographies in Contemporary Israeli Art. The interactive exhibit will be on display until December 17, 2015, at the Stedman Gallery in the Rutgers-Camden Center for the Arts and will open at Towson in February 2016.
Rosenberg and Isaacs have known each other since 1996 and began collaborating in 2007, leading to a first exhibition, A Complex Weave: Women and Identity in Contemporary Art. The exhibition opened at Rutgers-Camden in Fall 2009, at Towson in Spring 2010, and then toured nationwide to seven sites through 2013. “It was seen by around 20,000 people,” Rosenberg said. “When I decided to embark on my next major project, Susan was a natural partner.”
The new exhibit, Visions of Place, highlights issues of place and identity. Geography is an inescapable part of Israeli life, its psyche, and art, and issues in relation to geography in this broad sense are some of the most pressing in the contemporary world. The exhibition includes the work of contemporary artists, all Israeli citizens, who deal with this central aspect of Israeli art in ways that speak to these vital concerns from a range of viewpoints.
Although focused specifically on Israel, the issues raised by the exhibition have wide interest and applicability in the broader contemporary world, and many of the artists in the exhibition show their work internationally, epitomizing the power of place and identity within a specific topic.
Visions organizes the works into five different themes: “The Past in the Present,” which focuses on the historical and biblical Israel, including the Holocaust; “People in the Land,” which studies Zionism, tourism, the agricultural past and present, as well as some of the various populations that create Israel (as well as the Negev); “Diverse Identities,” which depicts different perspectives by artists dealing with myriad features of association in their work (including religious background, gender, sexual orientation, nationality and ethnicity); “Contested Geographies,” with focuses on the separation barrier, Settlements, the Gaza Strip, and the West Bank); and “Interventions: From Destruction to Healing,” which demonstrates images that depict how conflict leaves its mark on the land, and the call for peace through installations and performance works chronicled in videos.
The exhibition demonstrates the complexity and diversity of perspectives in contemporary Israeli art and Israeli society. Through a rich artistic experience, the exhibit is intended to catalyze a broader dialogue relating the paramount topics raised by Israel’s modern artists.
“When we began working on this project, although we both have expertise and curatorial experience in contemporary art, we did not know a great deal about contemporary Israeli art because little of it gets to the U.S.,” Rosenberg said. “We did extensive research, first through the internet, and then through trips to Israel, during which we visited most of the major galleries dealing in contemporary art, visited many artists’ studios, talked to leading figures in the Israeli contemporary art world, such as curators at major Israeli museums, Then, we did further research and through this lengthy process we identified a unifying theme and the artists and works we wanted to present. The work we found compelling suggested the central theme of the exhibition: geography, in its broadest contemporary sense, including historical, social, cultural, political, economic and other dimensions.”
Visions, which has taken four years to organize and execute, includes fifty-one works by thirty-six artists–half of who are women. All works touch on the idea of issues of history and identity (which, roughly, translates into the ideas of technology versus tradition). Each visitor will receive a 100-page exhibition catalog, which includes essays from Rutgers-Camden and Towson faculty. Related programming (such as an Israeli film festival, musical events, lectures, family workshops, and visiting artists) is scheduled for the remainder of the semester at Rutgers-Camden and Towson. The full list of events and dates can be found here.
Visions is a multi-media experience. Through video presentations, photographs, paintings, and even abstract sculpture, visitors become immersed within the political and artistic ideals of Israel. The videos were created by Robert A. Emmons Jr., Associate Director of the Rutgers-Camden Digital Studies Center. The exhibit also has a website with information on each work in the exhibition and biographies of the artists.
The exhibit has the potential to educate, challenge narrow views, and create important discussions about important issues. Rosenberg observed, “Art is one of the most powerful ways of reaching people, engaging them, and expressing ideas and emotions that can’t be expressed in any other way. When the art grapples with issues that are profoundly important, in such compelling ways, as the work in this exhibition does, it can literally change the way a person sees him or her self and the world.”
Visions of Place allows visitors to experience rich, powerful and multi-layered pieces of art that approach some of the most vital issues in the contemporary world from an assortment of perspectives. Rosenberg said, “As an art historian, I believe that art, when taken seriously and really engaged with, is one of the most powerful means of understanding what it means to be human, in all its complexities. It can often show us how much we have in common, despite our apparent differences. Visitors will come to the exhibition with a wide range of levels of knowledge and preconceptions about Israel. I hope the exhibition will engage each viewer in powerful and personal ways, and expand the viewer’s knowledge and conceptions of Israel, the world, and themselves, through the power of art. Regardless of the viewer’s background, I wish for them a powerful, personal experience that has a lasting impact. I hope viewers will connect in a very direct way with the works to which they are exposed.”
Through the art and its presentation in Visions of Place, visitors have the opportunity feel involved, experience change, and become inspired to learn more about the topics they encounter.
“Despite the limited human and financial resources at Rutgers-Camden, we have managed, with tremendous support from both internal and external sources, but particularly from Rutgers-Camden, as well as our partnership with my co-curator Susan Isaacs and her institution Towson University, to produce a world-class international art exhibition that addresses some of the most pressing issues in the world today,” Rosenberg said.
For further information about the exhibit, contact Dr. Martin Rosenberg at mailto:mrosenbe@camden.rutgers.edu.