Adam McKinney draws inspiration in his work from his Jewish, Black and Native American ancestry. (Andrew Eccles)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
The Jewish History Museum in Tucson is showing art by Buenos Aires-based multidisciplinary artist Mirta Kupferminc and the Holocaust Museum in Los Angeles is hosting an installation by Bay Area visual artist and filmmaker Tiffany Woolf. Both installations will be shown outside the museums at the start of Succot. Photos and videos from all three installations also will be displayed in the ground-floor windows of the 14th Street Y in New York.<\/p>\n
\u201cProjects such as \u2018Dwelling\u2019 create new configurations of talent, and as we look at the constrictions of the pandemic and the economy and safety, how will we use the creative assets of the Jewish community in new configurations?\u201d asked Melissa Martens Yaverbaum, executive director of the Council of American Jewish Museums, which collaborated on the project alongside Reboot, Asylum Arts and Laba: A Laboratory for Jewish Culture.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think we\u2019ve all been producing content for decades to serve the community and the public, and it\u2019s time to think about new ways of leveraging the voices, leveraging the talent and to look at the holidays as an opportunity.\u201d<\/p>\n
A second round of the project, which is being funded by Canvas, an initiative of the Jewish Funders Network that seeks to elevate Jewish arts and culture, will see installations at Jewish museums during Passover.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve seen that the pandemic has had a profound impact on everyone obviously, but the arts community has suffered in a very, very deep way economically,\u201d Canvas founder Lou Cove said. \u201cThe creative Jewish economy is struggling \u2026 and we really wanted to find a way to help as many artists and creatives as we could in this moment, recognizing that they are helping us so much to weather this pandemic. Artists and creatives are the ones who are distracting us, they\u2019re helping us process the pandemic, they\u2019re making us laugh.\u201d<\/p>\n
All the works grapple with the reality of the pandemic along with a number of other pressing issues, including institutional racism and ageism, forced isolation, global warming, and the crisis for migrants and refugees.<\/p>\n
For McKinney, who worked on the installation with his theater director husband Daniel Banks, the project provided a way to draw on the various parts of his identity in order to engage a diverse group of people. McKinney grew up in a Jewish family in Milwaukee, the son of a mother with roots in Eastern Europe and a father with African-American and Native American ancestry.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think it\u2019s a way for as many people to get connected to the work as possible, and it\u2019s also representative of my experience as a mixed-heritage Jew,\u201d he said. \u201cThat it\u2019s not like I see the world in one way, it\u2019s that I see the world in many different dimensions. That my experience of the world is one that is Black, and that is Jewish, and that is gay and that is Native heritage.\u201d<\/p>\n
It also allowed McKinney to break barriers \u2014 he\u2019s the first Jew of color to show his art at the Oregon Jewish Museum.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe opportunity to show the work of a Jew of color is particularly at this fraught moment, where Portland is the center of the Black Lives Matter protest movement, it\u2019s actually quite an honor to be able to show his work and to see how as a Jew of color he navigates both Jewish tradition and his Blackness,\u201d said the museum\u2019s director, Judy Margles.<\/p>\n
Due to the pandemic, McKinney had to create the entire installation from his home in Texas. That meant many Zoom calls and sharing architectural drawings of the museum\u2019s layout, so he could make sure the work fit the space.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s been a challenge, and we\u2019re up to that challenge,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd that\u2019s what we do as artists. And thinking about, is racism a challenge? Absolutely. Is anti-Semitism a challenge? Absolutely. And we still move in the direction of each other, and we still move in the direction of healing, and we still remember so that we\u2019ll never forget. And it\u2019s painful and hard and we keep doing it because we know that it makes a difference.\u201d<\/p>\n
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