Saturday, March 18, 2006
Funny, you don't look ...
GROWING up in Beverly Hills, Jessica Shokrian often felt like an outsider at family gatherings. Her American-born mother was a convert to Judaism. And though English was the language spoken at home, the older members of her father's Iranian family would speak to one another in Farsi, a language she neither knew nor understood.
When she was 16, her father bought her a camera, and everything changed. "His family came from another place. They have this whole other history, this whole past I wasn't a part of," Shokrian explains. "Through photography, I was able to connect with my family in a way that didn't need words."
Today a professional photographer and filmmaker, Shokrian is one of 13 artists commissioned by New York's Jewish Museum to create photography, videos and multimedia installations on the topic of Jewish identity. Chronicling a panoply of Jews — young and old, native-born and émigré, black and white, Latino and Asian, assimilated and unassimilated — the artists ask and try to answer the question of who is Jewish.
Their investigations make up "The Jewish Identity Project: New American Photography," opening at the Skirball Cultural Center this week. "You cannot make easy assumptions about who anybody is in the 21st century in America," says Lori Starr, Skirball senior vice president and museum director. "The story of Ellis Island and New York's Lower East Side is, by and large, the overwhelming story that people have of Jewish emigration to America. But this show really turns those assumptions upside down, saying Jews are not a monolithic single culture in America but in fact a very heterogeneous mix of people."
Chris Verene's "Prairie Jews," depicts his family and friends in Galesburg, Ill., where he grew up and where Jews were already living within 20 years of the city's founding in 1837. Verene's subjects, Jews and non-Jews, clown for the camera, pose with their friends, live alone into their 90s and otherwise go about their lives.
http://www.calendarlive.com/galleriesandmuseums/cl-ca-identity19mar19,0,2965579.story?coll=cl-art
GROWING up in Beverly Hills, Jessica Shokrian often felt like an outsider at family gatherings. Her American-born mother was a convert to Judaism. And though English was the language spoken at home, the older members of her father's Iranian family would speak to one another in Farsi, a language she neither knew nor understood.
When she was 16, her father bought her a camera, and everything changed. "His family came from another place. They have this whole other history, this whole past I wasn't a part of," Shokrian explains. "Through photography, I was able to connect with my family in a way that didn't need words."
Today a professional photographer and filmmaker, Shokrian is one of 13 artists commissioned by New York's Jewish Museum to create photography, videos and multimedia installations on the topic of Jewish identity. Chronicling a panoply of Jews — young and old, native-born and émigré, black and white, Latino and Asian, assimilated and unassimilated — the artists ask and try to answer the question of who is Jewish.
Their investigations make up "The Jewish Identity Project: New American Photography," opening at the Skirball Cultural Center this week. "You cannot make easy assumptions about who anybody is in the 21st century in America," says Lori Starr, Skirball senior vice president and museum director. "The story of Ellis Island and New York's Lower East Side is, by and large, the overwhelming story that people have of Jewish emigration to America. But this show really turns those assumptions upside down, saying Jews are not a monolithic single culture in America but in fact a very heterogeneous mix of people."
Chris Verene's "Prairie Jews," depicts his family and friends in Galesburg, Ill., where he grew up and where Jews were already living within 20 years of the city's founding in 1837. Verene's subjects, Jews and non-Jews, clown for the camera, pose with their friends, live alone into their 90s and otherwise go about their lives.
http://www.calendarlive.com/galleriesandmuseums/cl-ca-identity19mar19,0,2965579.story?coll=cl-art
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