‘Overtly political’ works withdrawn from CJM’s first ‘California Jewish Open’

By Joshua Kosman, San Francisco Chronicle, April 5, 2024
Image: Amy Osborne, Special to the Chronicle

A curated open-call exhibition scheduled to open in June at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco has run up against schisms within the Jewish community over Palestinian rights and the ongoing conflict in Gaza.

The “California Jewish Open” is scheduled to feature works by nearly 50 Jewish-identifying artists from throughout the state, including paintings, sculpture, video and more on the subjects of Jewish identity and the Jewish experience.

But seven of the 54 artists whose work had been accepted by guest curator Elissa Strauss subsequently withdrew from the exhibition over disagreements on the framing of political content in their work, museum representatives said on Thursday, April 4.

Museum representatives declined to identify any of the artists who had left the show, citing privacy concerns.

“Once Elissa had made her selections, we realized that, just as we’d expected, there were some works in the exhibition that were overtly political,” Senior Curator Heidi Rabben told the Chronicle, “and there were some that were more subtly political.

“So in a spirit of transparency, I reached out to all the artists in the show to give them the option of pulling out if they were uncomfortable for any reason.”

Rabben told participants that the show as planned would include works expressing grief over Hamas’ attack on Israeli civilians on Oct. 7, 2023, as well as some voicing opposition to Israel’s military campaign in Gaza and expressing support for Palestinian rights.

What ensued, said interim Executive Director Kerry King, was a series of negotiations with a small group of artists who wanted to impose certain conditions on their participation — conditions she was ultimately unable to satisfy. Among them, she said, was a requirement that the museum not work with particular funders because of their positions on Israel. King declined to share the others with the Chronicle.

“Having discussions about the art is one aspect of this,” King said. “But I represent the institution. I represent the board. I represent who we are at our core. And it became clear at a certain point that we could not, as an institution, make those changes.”

Rabben said those who withdrew represented all of the artworks in the show expressing support of Palestinian rights and opposing Israel’s actions in Gaza.

Instead of the accepted artworks, the exhibition — which is scheduled to run June 6-Oct. 20 — will now include blank spaces where those pieces would have gone.

“Once we understood the decisions that the artists had made, we looked at what impact that had on the exhibition,” Rabben said. “We had to ask ourselves, ‘Do we change the entirety of the exhibition, or do we try to find a way to maintain the dialogue that we feel is desperately needed for our audiences? ’ ”

Rabben said the empty spaces would include curatorial commentary but omit the names of the artists.

In a public statement, the museum said, “The absence of the artworks — and the missing perspectives that these empty spaces reflect — sincerely aims to hold space for critical thinking at this fraught time, and in doing so, space for the community at large.”

The episode at CJM is only the latest confrontation over Israel and Palestine to hit the art world. In March, Sara Fenske Bahat resigned as interim CEO of the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in the wake of public allegations that the organization had censored pro-Palestinian artists.

Open letters from eight artists and 15 YBCA employees drew nearly 500 signatories in support of the group’s demands, including that YBCA call for an immediate cease-fire in Gaza, and commit to an academic and cultural boycott of Israel.

CJM’s open call yielded more than 500 submissions from 219 different artists, said Strauss. The overall theme was connection, with the prompt, “How are artists looking to the many aspects of Jewish culture, identity, and community to foster, reimagine, hold, or discover connection?”

As the artistic director of LABA Bay Area, a Laboratory for Jewish Culture, part of an international network of centers for Jewish study and art, Strauss was brought in because of her in-depth familiarity with an array of Jewish creators across the state, Rabben said.

As Strauss went through submissions, she said, four key subthemes emerged, which created a structure for the exhibition.

“One is human connection, which is probably the most intuitive one when we think of connection. Another is connection with the Earth,” she explained. “Another is connection with time, because time is completely collapsed in Judaism. We don’t have history, we have memory — with past and future always swirled together.

“And the last section has to do with a connection to the divine.”

Of the submissions, Strauss said, only a relatively small number — no more than 15% — touched explicitly or implicitly on the conflict in Palestine.

The administrators said they hope to make the open exhibition a recurring project, returning every two or three years.

Read the fully illustrated article at San Francisco Chronicle.