12/15/2017
‘Hineni’ Exhibit Features Israeli Art from Local Collections
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Article reprinted with permission from Cleveland Jewish News.
By Amanda Koehn
Kovner, Michael (b. 1948 Hadera, Israel) Gilboa Mountain, c. 2008
The Jewish Federation of Cleveland’s Cleveland Israel Arts Connection will hold gallery open houses for “Hineni: Here I Am,” chronicling Israeli art in Cleveland collections, on Dec. 17 and Dec. 19 at the Roe Green Gallery at the Federation’s Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Building in Beachwood.
The gallery will feature works demonstrating the Israeli experience in relation to the country’s cultural and natural landscape. It is curated by Lisa Kurzner, associate curator of FRONT: The Cleveland Triennial, who said themes of a spiritual and physical home are present among the exhibit’s works.
“Thinking about the history of Israel as a place and a physical landscape that offers refuge to a people, I think that that was something that was on my mind, but also the idea of home as an idea might be attractive for people who are not in Israel,” Kurzner said. “So, when you say ‘next year in Jerusalem,’ there’s this idea that the Jewish people have one foot spiritually in Israel, whether or not they are actually there. And so there’s sort of a spiritual idea of Israel’s landscape, and a physical idea of what that landscape is about.”
Kurzner said the exhibit, which features a range of mediums, was curated mostly from collections at Progressive Insurance and Cleveland Clinic, as well as private personal collections.
Part two of the exhibit will open in March, featuring additional artwork.
“Once we got the show together in the Roe Green Gallery, it became apparent that there were other people with other works who would like to be considered for inclusion, and so we decided to make it a two-part exhibition,” Kurzner said.
Moreover, Kurzner said in building the exhibit, she found an interesting distinction between works by artists of younger and older generations in Israel.
“One thing that I was struck by in my surveying of the collections in Cleveland was how the older artists of ‘1948 generation’ carried their cultural history from Europe in a different way than do younger artists working in Israel today,” she said.
Additional open houses for the exhibit in 2018 are 1 to 3 p.m. Jan. 21; 6 to 8 p.m. Jan. 30; 1 to 3 p.m. Feb. 25 and 6 to 8 p.m. Feb. 27.
'Hineni: Here I Am' gallery open house
WHAT: Exhibit featuring Israeli artwork in Cleveland collections
WHEN: 1 to 3:30 p.m. Dec. 17; 6 to 8 p.m. Dec. 19
WHERE: Roe Green Gallery, Jewish Federation of Cleveland's Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Building, 25701 Science Park Drive, Beachwood
INFO: For questions or to register, email jlisiewski@jcfcleve.org.
