Material/Inheritance: Contemporary Work by New Jewish Culture Fellows is a new exhibition on view at the Jewish Museum of Maryland from March 26 through June 11, 2023.

Featuring the work of 30 artists whose work has been supported by the New Jewish Culture Fellowship (NJCF), the exhibit builds on the current renaissance in boundary-pushing, community-building contemporary Jewish art cited recently in Artforum.

Material/Inheritance seeks to help center the artist as beneficiary and generator of prophetic traditions, as elaborated by NJCF co-founder Maia Ipp in her widely-shared essay, “Kaddish for an Unborn Avant-Garde."

For generations, Jews have considered what it means to reinvent our shared collective identity in order to meet the demands and conditions of the moment. When the structures we use to organize our lives–health, climate, home, politics, and schooling among them–are in constant upheaval, what do we need in order to endure, and where can we find those tools? What does the future hold, and how much of that is in our own hands? What does it look like to celebrate and rejoice alongside continual waves of mourning, discomfort, and despair? 

Material/Inheritance: Contemporary Work by New Jewish Culture Fellows emphasizes resilience in contemporary forms of living and dialogue that find inspiration and foundation in ancestral Jewish texts, practices, histories, archives, and griefs. Each of the featured artists have been supported by the New Jewish Culture Fellowship (NJCF), a national arts fellowship that advances the work of groundbreaking artists by offering material support, mentorship, peer feedback, and shared cultural investigation. These thirty artists work across and between genres in new media, video, performance, painting, poetry, sculpture, and more. 

In line with the framing of NJCF, this exhibition and accompanying performances series holds open the generative tension between process and product, modernity and tradition, comfortable and unknown. Works address subject matter including chosen and biological family, queer and trans identities, embodiment and sexuality, diasporic homes, ritual reinventions, archival modalities, activist movements, political histories, and radical possibilities for regenerative and inventive survival.

Material/Inheritance was developed by Leora Fridman, Curator-in-Residence, in partnership with staff and leadership of the Jewish Museum of Maryland and the New Jewish Culture Fellowship, and with guidance from our curatorial committee: Gregg Bordowitz, visual artist, critic, poet, performer, filmmaker, writer, scholar, and teacher; Kendell Pinkney, Black-Jewish theatremaker, creative producer, founding Artist Director of THE WORKSHOP, and rabbi ordained by the Jewish Theological Seminary; Mónica Gomery, poet, rabbi at Kol Tzedek Synagogue and faculty of SVARA: A Traditionally Radical Yeshiva; and Heidi Rabben, Senior Curator at the Contemporary Jewish Museum.