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Lisa Kokin and Georgina Reskala on Identity and Community

Thursday, August 22, 2024 | 11:30am

ADMISSION: Free with Museum admission

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2024-08-22 11:30:00 UTC2024-08-22 23:00:00 UTC America/Los_AngelesThe CJM - 736 Mission St, San Francisco, CALisa Kokin and Georgina Reskala on Identity and CommunityIn this in-gallery talk, artists Lisa Kokin and Georgina Reskala, whose works are featured in the California Jewish Open, discuss their artwork and creative processes. Kokin, known for her fiber-based art and commentary on social justice, and Reskala, whose work deals with ideas of memory, history, and the power of narrative, will explore their artistic practice and how their Jewish heritage influences their art. Join us to explore how these two artists engage in storytelling through diverse materials and techniques, humor, and empathy. 

In this in-gallery talk, artists Lisa Kokin and Georgina Reskala, whose works are featured in the California Jewish Open, discuss their artwork and creative processes. Kokin, known for her fiber-based art and commentary on social justice, and Reskala, whose work deals with ideas of memory, history, and the power of narrative, will explore their artistic practice and how their Jewish heritage influences their art. Join us to explore how these two artists engage in storytelling through diverse materials and techniques, humor, and empathy. 

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About the Series

This program is part of the series Connecting with Jewishness through Art, a monthly series of gallery programs with artists featured in the California Jewish Open, discussing how their artistic practice expresses their Judaism or Jewish identity. At each program, two artists will come together in conversation with each other, the artwork, and the audience to provide context and insights into the complexities of their artwork.

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About the artists
Lisa Kokin
Lisa Kokin

Lisa Kokin lives and works in El Sobrante, California with her spouse, photographer Lia Roozendaal; Austin and Ollie, her canine studio assistants; and Bindi the cat. The daughter of upholsterers, she stitches everything she can get her hands on. Kokin brings a fiber sensibility and a conceptual approach to a diverse array of materials, including fabrics, paper, metal, and shredded money. Her work is often a commentary on the world around her, often incorporating the age-old Jewish response to adversity—humor—and an empathy for the underdog, which she attributes to growing up in a secular, liberal Jewish family in which issues of social justice were often discussed. 

Kokin has been the recipient of multiple awards and commissions, including a Eureka Fellowship, a WESTAF/NEA Regional Fellowship, the Dorothy Saxe Invitational Award for Creativity in Contemporary Arts from The Contemporary Jewish Museum, the Alameda County Arts Commission (multiple venues), and the Richmond Civic Center Public Art Interior Acquisitions Project. Her work is in numerous public and private collections, including the Boise Art Museum, the Buchenwald Memorial, the di Rosa Preserve, Mills College, Kaiser Permanente San Francisco, Yale University Art Museum, and Tiffany & Co. 

Kokin is represented by Gail Severn Gallery in Ketchum, ID. 

Georgina Reskala
Georgina Reskala

Georgina Reskala (Mexican-Lebanese) was born and raised in Mexico City. She received her BFA and MFA from the California College of the Arts, San Francisco. Reskala is an artist dealing with ideas of memory, history and the power of narrative. Through repetition, her works question the distortion of history through time and tie into ideas of collective memory and our shared past. In 2017, she was shortlisted for the Hariban Award in Kyoto, Japan. Her work has been shown nationally and internationally. She has had several solo exhibitions at PDX CONTEMPORARY ART, Portland OR., K.OSS Contemporary Detroit MI, The Meyer Simpson Library, Oakland CA, Contornos, Mexico City, and Quotidian, San Francisco, CA. Her work has been shown at Zona Maco Foto, Mexico City, Seattle Art Fair, Seattle WA., Photo LA, Los Angeles, CA., and Pulse Miami, Miami FL. Reskala’s work is held in the public collections of the Portland Art Museum, the Frye Art Museum (Seattle, WA), the Jordan Schnizter Museum of Art, University of Oregon, Cassilhaus Collection, Chapel Hill, NC and Museo Comunitario de Arte, Zacatecas, Mexico. 

 Reskala is represented by PDX CONTEMPORARY ART. 

About the Exhibition

California Jewish Open

The Museum’s first major open call exhibition invited Jewish-identifying artists in California to submit artworks in response to a central question: How are artists looking to the many aspects of Jewish culture, identity, and community to foster, reimagine, hold, or discover connection? The resulting exhibition brings together the work of forty-seven artists reflecting on their connection to Judaism, the world, and their own history. Through a wide range of media, including paintings, sculptures, interactive video games, video works, photographs, and more, the California Jewish Open illustrates some of the myriad ways in which these artists’ Jewish identity informs their connection to the world at large—and offers a window into the universal human need for connection in all its complexity.

A colorful graphic with white font reading "California Jewish Open"


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Supporters

Support for the California Jewish Open is generously provided by Judith and Robert Aptekar. The Contemporary Jewish Museum is supported in part by a grant from Grants for the Arts.

Image Credit

Georgina Reskala, Horas Transparentes, 2022. Courtesy the artist.