Joyce Carol Oates, Kenneth E. Silver & More Featured in November Programs at Jewish Museum

The Jewish Museum's extensive program offerings in November will include celebrated author Joyce Carol Oates in conversation with NPR book critic Alan Cheuse; an interactive performance conceived by innovative fashion collective threeASFOUR; artists Amy Sillman and Peter Doig in discussion about contemporary painting issues, and a lecture on Marc Chagall by noted scholar Kenneth E. Silver. These programs continue The Jewish Museum's expanded fall series of lectures, conversations and events.

For further information regarding these programs, visit TheJewishMuseum.org/calendar or call 212.423.3200.

PROGRAM SCHEDULE - NOVEMBER 2013

Performance: Fest (Part of Performa 13)

Sunday, November 10, 6pm

This interactive performance conceived by innovative fashion collective threeASFOUR - Gabriel Asfour, Adi Gil, and Angela Donhauser - combines avant-garde fashion and ancient bread-breaking rituals. This event features three female performers wearing couture dresses of bread baked in shapes of the five Platonic solids. The performers will stand in the center of a five-pointed star surrounded by geometric vessels, each containing a spice representing one of the five classical elements: fire, earth, air, ether, and water. Audience members will be invited to perform a ritual hand washing before breaking bread off the dresses and dipping it in spices. This event is presented as part of Performa 13, the only biennial dedicated to new visual art performance across disciplines. Fest is designed in collaboration with culinary curator Naama Shefi, Studio Christian Wassmann, Oliver Halsman Rosenberg, Bradley Rothenberg, and Breads Bakery, and has been conceived in relation to to the exhibition, threeASFOUR: MER KA BA. Fest is presented by The Jewish Museum and Art Production Fund.

The multimedia installation threeASFOUR: MER KA BA by the adventurous fashion collective threeASFOUR fuses avant-garde couture, architecture, and video projections. Blending ancient symbols with new technologies to evoke a timeless desire for cross-cultural unity, the exhibition includes examples from threeASFOUR's new spring-summer 2014 collection, featuring 3D-printed textiles made in collaboration with the architect Bradley Rothenberg. The clothing line and its environment are inspired by sacred geometry and tile patterns found in synagogues, churches, and mosques around the world. threeASFOUR: MER KA BA is presented by The Jewish Museum and Art Production Fund, and is on view through February 2, 2014.

Free - reservations are required

Lecture: Kenneth E. Silver
Salo W. Baron Program
Tuesday, November 12, 11:30am

Kenneth E. Silver will give a lecture discussing Marc Chagall as a key figure operating between the Jewish and Christian worlds of his Russian roots, with an emphasis on Chagall's many paintings of Jesus Christ. This talk will elaborate on topics discussed in Dr. Silver's Chagall: Love, War, and Exile exhibition catalogue essay "Fluid Chaos Felt by the Soul: Chagall, Jews, and Jesus."

Kenneth E. Silver is Professor of Art History at New York University, where he lectures on French and American 20th-century art.

The Jewish Museum is presenting Chagall: Love, War, and Exile which, for the first time in the U.S., explores a significant but neglected period in the artist's career, from the rise of fascism in the 1930s through 1948, years spent in Paris and then in exile in New York. Beginning with the evocative paintings from his years in France, Chagall: Love, War, and Exile illuminates an artist deeply responsive to the suffering inflicted by war and to his own personal losses and concerns. Although he never abandoned a poetic sensibility, his art of the 1930s and 1940s reflects the political reality of the time. Most unexpected is the recurring appearance of the figure of the crucified Jesus as a metaphor for war, Jewish suffering and persecution. By the mid-1940s, Chagall returns to joyful, colorful compositions expressing the power of love. The exhibition is on view through February 2, 2014.

Tickets: $15 adults; $12 students/seniors; $10 Jewish Museum members

The Salo W. Baron Program has been endowed by the Trustees of the Salo W. and Jeannette M. Baron Foundation

Joyce Carol Oates in Conversation with Alan Cheuse

Thursday, November 14, 7:30pm

Celebrated writer Joyce Carol Oates joins NPR book critic, author, and Moment Magazine fiction editor Alan Cheuse for a discussion on the promise and purpose of fiction. In addition, the winners of the annual Moment Magazine-Karma Foundation Short Fiction Contest will also read from their winning stories. The program is presented by The Jewish Museum and the Moment Magazine-Karma Foundation Short Fiction Contest.

Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of the National Book Award and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including the national bestsellers We Were the Mulvaneys and Blonde (a finalist for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize), and The New York Times bestsellers The Falls (winner of the 2005 Prix Femina Etranger) and The Gravedigger's Daughter. Alan Cheuse is Fiction Editor for Moment Magazine and the author of five novels, four collections of short fiction, and the memoir Fall Out of Heaven. He is a regular book commentator for NPR's All Things Considered, and his fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, The Antioch Review, Prarie Schooner, New Letters, The Idaho Review, and The Southern Review.

Tickets: $15 adults; $12 students/seniors; $10 Jewish Museum members

Author Talk: Julie Orringer

The Saul and Gladys Gwirtzman Lecture

Monday, November 18, 11:30am

Julie Orringer will discuss her novel, The Invisible Bridge (Knopf, 2010). From the small Hungarian town of Konyár, to the grand opera houses of Budapest and Paris, to the horrors of forced labor camps, The Invisible Bridge tells the story of a love tested by disaster in a time of war. Orringer will also shares a glimpse of her current research on the American journalist Varian Fry, the subject of an upcoming novel.

Julie Orringer is the author of How to Breathe Underwater, a short story collection (2003). Her stories have been published in The Yale Review, the Paris Review, Ploughshares, Zoetrope All-Story, and The Washington Post Magazine. She is the recipient of two Pushcart Prizes, and her work has appeared in numerous anthologies, including The Granta Book of the American Short Story, The Best American Nonrequired Reading, and The Scribner Anthology of American Short Fiction.

Tickets: $15 adults; $12 students/seniors; $10 Jewish Museum members

Performance: No Further Instructions - Howard Fishman & Michael Benanav

Thursday, November 21, 7:00pm

Critically acclaimed musician and composer Howard Fishman and his childhood friend, New York Times journalist, author, and photographer Michael Benanav, present a unique blend of song, historical memoir, images, and storytelling in a performance about their travels through rural Romania and Hungary.

Howard Fishman's infectious, spontaneous, and unvarnished music has made him a favorite of audiences and critics alike. He has headlined in some of the most prestigious venues in the United States and abroad, including Lincoln Center, The Steppenwolf Theatre, The Blue Note, The Pasadena Playhouse, Joe's Pub, The Great American Music Hall, and Le Petit Journal in Paris. Michael Benanav is known for immersing himself in foreign cultures and bringing compelling images and stories back from distant places. He is the author of Joshua and Isadora: A True Tale of Loss and Love in the Holocaust (2010) and Men of Salt: Crossing the Sahara on the Caravan of White Gold (2008).

Tickets: $15 adults; $12 students/seniors; $10 Jewish Museum members

Conversation: Painting Beyond Belief 1

Sunday, November 24, 6:30pm

Painting Beyond Belief 1 offers artists Amy Sillman and Peter Doig in a conversation moderated by Jordan Kantor, Associate Professor of Painting, California College of the Arts. Developed alongside the exhibition Chagall: Love, War, and Exile, this three-part series explores issues in contemporary painting since the death of Marc Chagall in 1985. Additional programs in the Painting Beyond Belief series will take place on January 21 and January 26.

Amy Sillman's work has been widely exhibited and is included in numerous public collections, including The Museum of Modern Art in New York, The Art Institute of Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. The first large scale survey of her work, Amy Sillman: One Lump or Two, is on view at The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston through January 5, 2014, and will travel to the Aspen Art Museum and the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College. Edinburgh-born artist Peter Doig has received solo exhibitions at Tate Britain and the National Galleries of Scotland, and his work has been on view at the Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Hammer Museum, among others.

Free - Reservations are required

Public Programs at The Jewish Museum are supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs. Major annual support is provided by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature. The stage lighting system has been funded by the Office of Manhattan Borough President Scott M. Stringer.