Shotgun Reviews are an open forum where we invite the international art community to contribute timely, short-format responses to an exhibition or event. If you are interested in submitting a Shotgun Review, please click this link for more information. In this Shotgun Review, Carlos Kong reviews From Generation to Generation: Inherited Memory and Contemporary Art at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco. Memories take[…..]

From Generation to Generation: Inherited Memory and Contemporary Art at the Contemporary Jewish Museum explores Marianne Hirsch’s work on “postmemory,” which posits that even without direct experience, we identify so strongly with some historic events and ancestral stories that we take them as our own. Hirsch’s work and the exhibition examine the role of imagination within memory and the way that it shapes contemporary identity.[…..]

Today from our partners at Art Practical, we bring you Vanessa Kauffman’s review of Night Begins the Day at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco. The author notes, “The many pieces in the exhibition […] do not mimic the sublimity of the universe in its raw state—a view that is impossible to achieve in a practical sense. Instead, these are revelations of the Earth and its ethers[…..]

From our partners at Art Practical, today we bring you a Shotgun Review of Josh Greene’s Bound to Be Held at the Contemporary Jewish Museum. Author Adriana Rabinovitch notes that the exhibition “allows for visitors to grasp, and possibly reciprocate, a relationship that a stranger has with a literary work.” This review was originally published on April 18, 2015. Josh Greene’s Bound to Be Held: A Book Show[…..]

Today from our partners at Art Practical we bring you a review of Work in Progress: Considering Utopia at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco. Author Mary Anne Kluth notes, “The exhibition as a whole positions art as a space to think through, test, and potentially develop goal-oriented models of human interaction.” This article was originally published on January 7, 2014. The three artists in Work in Progress:[…..]

From our friends at KQED, today we bring you a review of Work in Progress: Approaching Utopia at the Contemporary Jewish Museum. Author Sarah Hotchkiss notes, “…the exhibition makes an irrefutable argument for the importance of art as a tool of social change. The artists’ models, socially engaged artwork, and narrative experiments approach utopia, question it, and allow viewers to process the larger issues behind collective[…..]

In an era when organized religion is losing its hold on the industrialized world, it may seem strange that curators would want to reengage with spirituality when considering Western Modernism of the past one hundred years. Stranger still that a museum focused on exploring the contemporary shape of Jewish life would take an interest in exhibiting work by practicing Buddhists, Muslims, Christians, and New Age[…..]