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The Middle St. Gallery in Washington will show black-and-white portraits by photographer Susan Raines from April 21 through May 28. Gallery member Paulo Neuhaus will also offer a small collection of his photographs along with works by other members of the non-profit artists’ cooperative.
Raines’s show, “Out and About in Black and White,” offers portraits made over many years, some for publication in newspapers and magazines and others for a calendar of Atlanta bars. Many of the photos are part of her ongoing personal series of portraits; they are not studio portraits but are of people in their every-day settings – such as dressing rooms, bars, restaurants, a Navajo reservation.
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Native American artist Leonard Harmon can tell you precisely the moment his life as an artist changed. He’d been invited to Indigenous People’s Day at the 21c Museum Hotel in Cincinnati. He’d taken some of the quill art he’d become known for, as well as a couple of mixed media paintings.
“The director said to me, ‘What else do you have?,’” Harmon recalled. “I couldn’t answer the question. I didn’t have anything. They said, ‘You need to get to work.’ I started painting and focusing on just that. By the sixth or seventh painting, they took it automatically and put it in the museum.”
Harmon’s show This One’s For You – Honoring Ancestors opens Friday, April 21, with a reception from 6 to 8 p.m., in the Newport Visual Arts Center and continues through May 28. We talked with Harmon about his art, his inspiration, and his move to Oregon. His comments have been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Tell us a bit about life before Oregon.
Harmon: I was born in Philadelphia, grew up in Washington, D.C., and Millsboro, Delaware. I’m a citizen of the Nanticoke Tribe of Millsboro, and the Lenape Tribe of New Jersey. I come from a long line of artists. My namesake was Leonard Allen Harmon. He was doing his work in the mid ‘70s to early ‘80s. A lot was featured in Native American magazines and also at the Heard Museum. Tragically, he died from AIDs in the mid ‘80s. My father did Native American furniture and he would paint on the tops. He was a big deal in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware. He took his life in 2007. So, I have all this art in my background. I’m really the last one to carry on that arc in the family. That’s what my art is about, carrying on those traditions in my family.
How have you developed as an artist?
I’m self-taught. I started in my teens as a DJ; I considered that an art. I started taking art seriously in my early 20s. I started porcupine quills in 2011. It just came naturally to me. It’s the same thing with painting. I’ve only been painting for 2-1/2 years. When I picked up a paintbrush for the first time, it just clicked. It’s so embedded in my DNA to be an artist.
What inspires you?
I think my uncle really inspires my work the most. I had a really tight connection with him for the four years I was alive before he passed. The day I was born, my mom saw him in me. That is what inspires me the most.
Where else have you shown your work?
Right now, I have work at 21c Museum Hotel in Cincinnati for a show called Refuge: Needing, Seeking, Creating Shelter. I have two pieces at the Ely Center of Contemporary Art in New Haven [Conn.] at a show called Truth in Three Colors, and I have a live show coming up at 21c in Cincinnati where I’ll do a live 4-by-8-foot painting.
You’ve been living on the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians’ reservation in Siletz for about three years. What brought you west?
In the early 2000s, I got connected with a Siletz tribal member. I was living in Delaware and I was known for my pine-needle baskets. It’s cool, because basket-making is one of the Siletz tribe’s biggest mediums and one of their oldest. She had seen my work on Instagram. She asked me to make some earrings. I told her we’d make a trade. So, she made something for me, and I made a few things for her. And then we just stayed friends, and I started coming out to visit. I realized this is where I should be.
You mentioned you feel a certain connection to the area.
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Newport reminds me of the Ocean City, Maryland, fishing port or Rehoboth Beach. My Uncle Tyrone owned a fishing marina in Rehoboth, and as a kid, I would come from D.C. and work on the docks for the summer.
And there’s also a sort of Rick Bartow connection?
Right. When I went to the Heard Museum, they gave me a bunch of magazines. And in every one, Rick and my Uncle Leonard were together. There’d be a story on Rick Bartow on one page, and on the next page, a story on Leonard Harmon. I have the feeling they knew each other, because my uncle would move up and down the West Coast and visit artists. I would have loved to have met Rick [who died in 2016] and asked if he knew my uncle.
Many of the paintings in This One’s for You feature a strip of red. What is the significance of that?
The theme of the show is connecting with my family’s past and looking toward the future. The red signifies the bloodline that runs through us as human beings, not just being an Indigenous person and those types of lines, but the root of it all, where we all come from.
“Documenting Israel: Visions of 75 Years” will open at the Museum of Tolerance Jerusalem on Independence Day. The exhibition will include documentation of Israel since before its establishment through photographs and works of renowned local and international photographers.
The exhibition was curated by Anna-Patricia Kahn, founder of the international photography gallery °CLAIRbyKahn. She has curated exhibitions of the most prominent photographers of the 20th and 21st centuries.
The exhibition includes 120 photographs and one video, compromising the works of 12 artists from 1931 until today. The selected works draw a diverse portrait of Israeli society and offer many viewpoints to observe Israel, its development and the growth of its communities.
‘Documenting Israel: Visions of 75 Years’ photo exhibition (credit: Museum of Tolerance)Two founders of the international photography agency Magnum, Jewish photographers Robert Capa and David “Chim” Seymour, visited Israel frequently from 1947 to 1956 and closely documented the rise of the state in its earliest years. The documentation of these photographers, who gained worldwide fame due to their international work covering wars and conflicts, presents an optimistic point of view on the new state that was established from the ruins of the Holocaust.
The exhibition includes never-before-seen documentation from photographer Inge Morath, one of the first women members of the Magnum photographic agency. Her photographs will be shown alongside the work of other senior photographers, including Israeli photographer Micha Bar-Am and modern artists Benyamin Reich and Nanna Heitmann, as well as the video work of international Israeli artist Sigalit Landau.
The exhibition culminates in a large-scale exhibit that presents dialogue photographs taken in Mandatory Palestine in the 1930s by Swiss avant-garde portrait photographer Helmar Lerski, alongside works commissioned in January by American photographer Bruce Gilden.
The exhibition will open to the general public starting in May. Entry is subject to prior registration on the museum’s website.
El Paso Inc. won multiple awards, including first place for a Father’s Day story focused on a blended family, in a state journalism contest.
Last spring, the 29th Lipinsky Family San Diego Jewish Arts Festival was well under way at the Lyceum Theatre in downtown San Diego when its founding organization, San Diego Repertory Theatre, collapsed with an insurmountable $2 million of debt.
San Diego Rep is no more, but JFest is rising again. Thanks to an outpouring of support from Jewish community organizations, private donors, international artists and local venue operators who have offered both financial support and performance space, the 30th-anniversary JFest will return June 1 through July 16 in a reimagined form.
In the past, JFest held most of its events at the Rep’s former home, the city-owned Lyceum Theatre. The new festival will present events all over the county at venues in La Jolla, Encinitas, Balboa Park, Hillcrest, Solana Beach, East Village and Carlsbad. This year’s venues include two professional theater companies, a Universalist church, a farm, a movie theater and a Jewish temple.
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JFest’s founding artistic director, Todd Salovey, said he was overwhelmed by the community’s desire to rescue the festival, particularly the generous sponsorship by the fest’s longtime donors, the Lipinsky family of San Diego, as well as a new producing partner, the Lawrence Family Jewish Community Center in La Jolla.
But even with those offers of support, Salovey said it was herculean effort to cobble together a new management team and festival program. He said it was touch and go for months, but several weeks ago, he and his team saw the light at the end of the tunnel.
“We felt like a start-up,” he said. “There was a lot of work to do without us knowing what would actually happen. About a month ago, we all looked at each other and realized this is going to happen.”
Theatre Dybbuk of Los Angeles, pictured last year, will perform “The Merchant of Venice (Annotated), or In Sooth I Know Not Why I Am So Sad” at the 2023 Lipinsky Family San Diego Jewish Arts Festival.
(Taso Papadakis)
Salovey has returned in the role of artistic director. JFest’s new managing director is Matt Graber, who served as director of marketing and later as director of external affairs at San Diego Rep from 2015 to 2022 and is now chief marketing officer for San Diego Opera.
Joining them as festival advisers are Rebecca Myers, producer of the fest’s 3-year-old Whole Megillah Jewish New Play Festival, and Ali Viterbi, a festival producer and an associate artistic director for more than a decade.
Graber said this summer’s festival will be a “proof of concept” test to see if the public will support the festival in its new form. If it is successful, the creative team plans to put together a new mission, vision and values statement as well as a three-year fiscal plan.
Despite the challenging year in relaunching the festival, Graber and Salovey said they feel optimistic about the future.
“It has given us a freedom that we can make the festival take on different programming and be more ambitious,” Salovey said. “That will be super exciting.”
Besides working with the local artists that past festival-goers know, Salovey said he would love to attract even more international touring Jewish artists such as frequent past performer Hershey Felder and this summer’s Perla Batalla. He’d also like to produce more new events, like this summer’s 24-hour “Eco-Jewish Play Fest,” and perhaps partner on full theatrical productions with other local theater companies.
But the festival’s core goals won’t change.
“We love that our audience is not just Jewish,” Salovey said. “It’s important we demystify and de-stereotype the images of what we think Jewish people are and [that] we develop an audience across communities.”
Graber said a rising tide of anti-Semitism both in the United States and abroad has made it more important than ever for the festival to expand and diversify its audience.
“We want to represent Jews of many hues and we want to take the festival out to people,” he said. “We have to do what we can to ‘un-otherize’ ourselves. … One of the best ways to un-otherize people is through art. We want to represent the entire breadth and weight of the diaspora.”
When: Thursday, June 1, through Sunday, July 16
Cost: $18-$50
Information: sdjfest.org
Schedule:
• Festival launch party: 7:30 p.m. June 1, Lawrence Family Jewish Community Center, 4126 Executive Drive, La Jolla. Details to come.
CCAE Theatricals’ world-premiere musical “Witnesses” won the top prize at the San Diego Theatre Critics Circle’s 2022 Craig Noel Awards.
(Ken Jacques)
• “Witnesses” concert: One-night reunion concert-style performance of CCAE Theatricals’ award-winning world-premiere 2022 musical inspired by the diaries of five European Jewish teenagers who died in the Holocaust. 2 p.m. June 4, Lawrence Family Jewish Community Center, La Jolla.
• “Judaism & Art” by Rabbi Meir Soloveitchik: The senior rabbi of Congregation Shearith Israel in Manhattan will be the festival keynote speaker. 7:30 p.m. June 5, Congregation Adat Yeshurun, 8625 La Jolla Scenic Drive North, La Jolla.
• The Whole Megillah New Jewish Play Festival: “Unapologetically Jewish” new plays will be presented at local theaters. 7:30 p.m. June 7 and 7 p.m. June 11 at The Old Globe, 1363 Old Globe Way, Balboa Park; 7:30 p.m. July 6 and 2 p.m. July 9 at New Village Arts, 2787 State St., Carlsbad.
• “Neshama — Music of the Soul”: A communitywide concert of pop, folk, klezmer, classical, Sephardic, dance and Middle Eastern music. 7:30 p.m. June 8, The Old Globe, Balboa Park.
• 14th annual Woman of Valor: Celebration of six San Diego Jewish women — Annie Benaroch, Amelia Glaser, Jan Landau, Fanny Krasner Lebovits, Sheila Lipinsky and Beth Sirull. 1 p.m. June 11, Leichtag Commons, 441 Saxony Road, Encinitas.
• “Hereville”: Family-friendly musical by Robby Sandler and Lizzie Hagstead about a time-traveling, monster-fighting orthodox Jewish girl. 7 p.m. June 11 at The Old Globe, Balboa Park, and 2 p.m. July 9 at New Village Arts, Carlsbad.
Perla Batalla will perform some of Leonard Cohen’s lesser-known songs and share anecdotes about their friendship on June 15.
(Courtesy photo)
• Perla Batalla in “House of Cohen”: The Grammy-nominated Batalla, who once toured as a backup singer with Canadian singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen, performs some of his lesser-known songs and shares anecdotes about their friendship. 7:30 p.m. June 15, Lawrence Family Jewish Community Center, La Jolla.
• Theatre Dybbuk presents “The Merchant of Venice (Annotated), or In Sooth I Know Not Why I Am So Sad”: This Los Angeles-based Jewish theater company presents its latest play, exploring the history and theatricality of one of William Shakespeare’s most controversial plays. 2 p.m. June 18, Lawrence Family Jewish Community Center, La Jolla.
Singer Matisyahu will appear June 20 as part of the San Diego Jewish Arts Festival.
(Charles Vidal)
• Matisyahu in concert: This Jewish American singer, known for his pop hit “One Day,” performs reggae, rap, beatboxing and alternative pop. 8 p.m. June 20, Belly Up Tavern, 143 S. Cedros Ave., Solana Beach.
• 22nd Klezmer Summit: The World of Jewish Music: Yale Strom, Elizabeth Schwartz and Hot Pstromi will perform Jewish music from Western and Eastern Europe and the Middle East with guests Farhad Bahrami, Corale Thuet, Robert Zelickman and Fred Benedetti. 7:30 p.m. June 21, First Universalist Unitarian Church of San Diego, 298 W. Arbor Drive, Hillcrest.
• “Recordially Yours, Lou Curtiss”: Screening of Yale Strom’s new documentary that chronicles the life and times of local audiophile and raconteur Lou Curtiss, who created both the San Diego Folk Festival and the Adams Ave. Unplugged Festival and ran Folk Arts Rare Records in San Diego. 7 p.m. June 25, Digital Gym Cinema, Park & Market, 1100 Market St., East Village. The screening will be preceded by a talk about Jews and folk music at 6:15 p.m.
• “Chagall”: This concert reading, created by writer-composer Yale Strom and writer-director Todd Salovey, traces how Bella and Marc Chagall became refugees in their lives and art. 7:30 p.m. July 6, New Village Arts, Carlsbad.
• Eco-Jewish Play Fest: Coastal Roots Farm will collaborate with Rebecca Fletcher on this new event, in which seven writers, directors and stage managers and 21 actors will be given 24 hours to create seven short plays inspired by the farm’s core Jewish values of sustainable agriculture and food justice. 6 p.m. July 16, Leichtag Commons, Encinitas. ◆
