The Greensboro Contemporary Jewish Museum: 

Chutzpah As Art Practice

An Artist Talk and Collaborative Community Introduction 

with

Shoshana Gugenheim Kedem

7-9 pm Thursday, September 12th, 2019

A Jewish Museum in my little Greensboro? Who has the chutzpah to do such a thing? But there was no capital campaign! What does it take for a small city with a very small Jewishcommunity to claim the cultural agency to create a Jewish museum of their own? What would be collected in this museum? Who or what amongst the Jewish people would be represented? What would that representation look like through material and other cultural production? What would make this museum unique? 

Join us for a generative conversation with interdisciplinary artist, Shoshana Gugenheim Kedem, former Charlotte, NC teenage cheerleader and now founding artist of the GreensboroContemporary Jewish Museum (GCJM)*. Shoshana will discuss the arc of her work through the lens of Judaism, Jewish indigenous craft, women, erasure and re-insertion followed by a community-wide, collaborative introduction to the GCJM and the participatory practices that make its creation available to the broad public. 

*The Greensboro Contemporary Jewish Museum, the only museum of its kind in North Carolina, will be a pop-up Jewish museum created in collaboration with the greater GreensboroJewish public and students and faculty in the Jewish Studies and Museum Studies programs and the College of Visual and Performing Arts at the University of North Carolina Greensboro.  Focusing on object as agent of faith, the Museum will house, in both a central and decentralized model, household/everyday objects that facilitate contemporary Jewishpractice and faith in its varied forms. 

About the Artist:

Shoshana Gugenheim Kedem is a social practice artist, Torah scribe, curator and educator. Shoshana reinvents traditional rituals and the objects that activate them by reinserting both, with new forms, into familiar contexts.  Her work gazes upon issues of power and privilege and engages institutional critique as a practice of imagining new possibilities, often through publicly generated solutions. Shoshana has lived for over 20 years in Israel and is temporarily residing in Portland, OR where she and her family staff The Gugenheim Museum Portland in their residence. 

 

 

https://shoshanagugenheim.com