Friday, Nov 10, 2017 • 12:30–1pm
ADMISSION: Free with Museum admission
Goodman’s hanging paper installation is inspired by the final scene in the tale The Bird of Happiness. This scene reveals the young king’s daily ritual of spending an hour inside of a shack, dressed in the rags he grew up in, looking at his reflection in a mirror. During this hour, the king looks back on where he came from in order to move his kingdom forward.
Julia Goodman creates low relief sculptural paper pieces from pulped, repurposed bed sheets, and T-shirts. These projects recontextualize the history of pre-paper technology, working within narrow material limits of plant-based materials to explore human interconnectedness, life cycles, and symmetry between the celestial and the terrestrial.
Want to read the stories that inspired these works of art? Howard Schwartz, a three-time winner of the National Jewish Book Award, has gathered together one hundred of the most astonishing and luminous stories from Jewish folk tradition in Leaves From the Garden of Eden, the reference book for The CJM exhibition, Jewish Folktales Retold: Artist as Maggid.
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Installation view of Jewish Folktales Retold: Artist as Maggid (September 28, 2017–January 28, 2018), The Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco. Photo Credit: JKA Photography.