EXCERPT
Jewish Anti-Zionist Artists Withdraw From Contemporary Jewish Museum Show
The group asked for the ability to modify or remove their works and for the SF institution to divest from “Israeli governmental and pro-Zionist foundation funding.”
Matt Stromberg April 5, 2024
A group of anti-Zionist Jewish artists is withdrawing artwork they submitted for the forthcoming
California Jewish Open at the Contemporary Jewish Museum (CJM) in San Francisco, citing the
institution’s “inability to meet artists’ demands, including transparency around funding and a
commitment to BDS [Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions].”
In a statement on Thursday, April 4, California Jewish Artists for Palestine added that the CJM “has been a target of the BDS Movement for having received funding directly from the State of Israel as well as private Zionist philanthropists.”
The statement was signed by 11 artists, including seven whose work had originally been accepted into the exhibition and four whose work had not: Micah Bazant, Liat Berdugo, Jules Cowan,Rebekah Erev, Rebecca Maria Goldschmidt, Steph Kudisch, Kate Laster, Ava Sayaka Rosen, Sophia Sobko, Arielle Tonkin, and Irina Zadov.
The California Jewish Open is an open-call exhibition featuring 47 Jewish-identifying artists living in the state and organized around the prompt of how “Jewish culture, identity, and community [can] foster, reimagine, hold, or discover connection.”
In a press release on Thursday, the museum acknowledged the artists who withdrew from the show and said the space on the walls where their artwork was to hang would be left blank, in a gesture to “both honor the
perspective that would have been shared through these works, and to authentically reflect the struggle for dialogue that is illustrated by the artists’ decisions to withdraw.”
Source:
https://hyperallergic.com/897205/jewish-anti-zionist-artists-withdraw-from-contemporary-jewish-museum-show/