Greensboro Contemporary Jewish Museum – To engage Jewish artists from the southern region of the United States in Jewish learning while training them in the methodologies and pedagogy of art and social practice.

How might this project reshape the role of Jewish art and artists in the south?

The Greensboro Contemporary Jewish Museum and its Social Practice Institute centers the vibrant and often overlooked cultural production of southern Jewish artists. Our approach to cultural production is through the pedagogy of socially engaged art practice, an approach that emphasizes collaboration, public participation, site-specificity, and interdisciplinarity. Artists and the public are engaged in dialogues and collaborations that help make meaning of contemporary Jewish life in the South. The work of the GCJM Social Practice Institute will establish new genres in contemporary Jewish art that move beyond Judaica, beyond the representational, and beyond the gallery, and position participating artists as community facilitators making meaningful interpretation of lived Jewish experience.

What’s exciting to you about working in the Jewish space?

Having grown up in the South, where all of my family still resides, I have found that I share a particular Jewish experience and lens on the world that Jews from other regions do not possess. My Jewish identity was primarily born out of being othered. It was not something that I owned until much later in my life when I moved to New England and then to Israel. I have a soft spot in my heart for southern Jewish communities and I thrive in that ripe and vital intersection between contemporary art practice and Jewish identity. I don’t shy away from bringing my Jewish self to my art practice, and I want to facilitate that same meaning-making for others.

Learn more at www.greensborocjm.org.