About
Redefining the 21st Century Jewish Museum
Our experimental, pop up (or long term) Jewish museums are created for and with “the people” in communities that wouldn’t typically have the cultural agency and backing to establish a Jewish museum. Our museums (yes, plural!) center contemporary Jewish identity and education, cultural production, and artistic research through the lens and practice of the lived Jewish experience. We support our series of contemporary Jewish museums by producing exhibitions, public programs, catalogues, media projects and art programming with and for the communities we serve. Our museums show up in unexpected ways and places where people and ideas come together. ACJM may or may not include traditional exhibition space. The museum may be entirely outdoors. It may be an experience, a conversation, a walk, or a series of public, arts-based programs. What is essential is that our work converges at the nexus of contemporary art practice and Jewish life, leaving everything open for interpretation, experimentation and exploration with the goal of reimagining the 21st century contemporary Jewish museum in the United States and beyond.
HISTORY
Beginning in 2020 with the founding of the Greensboro Contemporary Jewish Museum, in Greensboro, North Carolina, a city with a population of 3,000 Jews, A Contemporary Jewish Museum asserts that Jewish museums can emerge anywhere and in a multitude of creative forms. We invited residents, business owners, institutions, artists and others in Greensboro, NC to join us in collaboration, as we asked: What can serve as an emerging model of a contemporary Jewish museum in the United States today? How can small Jewish communities claim the same cultural agency to create a Jewish museum as that of their more metropolitan counterparts in San Francisco, New York or Los Angeles? What would be housed in this museum? Who among the Jewish people would be represented? What would that representation look like through material and other cultural production? What could this museum offer to the discourse on contemporary Jewish life?
We are honored to have collaborated with hundreds of people and dozens of local institutions in the making of the GCJM. Our work has been internationally recognized and supported by both arts and Jewish foundations. The GCJM spurned a Jewish cultural renaissance in Greensboro, bringing Southern-based Jewish artists together for a 12-day on site residency, leading to two arts publications through our ACJM press and providing a new platform for Jewish arts and culture public programming in this small southern town.
Today our work exists under the umbrella of A Contemporary Jewish Museum as we continue to establish contemporary Jewish museums in off-the-beaten-path locations across the Jewish Diaspora.
WHO WE ARE
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Founder
https://www.shoshanagugenheim.com/Shoshana Gugenheim Kedem | שושנה גוגנהיים קדם is an American/Israeli social practice artist, Torah scribe, curator and chutzpanit. Her work often rests in the borderlands where tradition and change meet allowing for new forms to emerge. Shoshana’s work takes shape as large and small scale collaborations with public and private audiences in a wide array of contexts from prisons, to houses of faith, museums, schools, rural fields or rivers. These socially engaged encounters are sculpted by brave and sometimes whimsical collaborations perhaps through a conversation, a blind-folded game, a silent canoe ride, an urban walk, a civics test, a shared meal or more. Shoshana brings her studies in studio arts, dance, anthropology, education, facilitation, meditation and spiritual leadership to her work.
Shoshana was one of the first women in modern times to train and practice as a Torah scribe. She led the scribing of two Torah scrolls written collectively and exclusively by women. Her scribal work inspired her international Jewish women artists collaboration, Women of the Book, launched with the Jerusalem Biennale in 2015 and acquired as a limited edition print set by the Yale University Arts Library Collection and other private collectors. Today her work as a Hebrew scribe manifests through Or Hadash | עור חדש , an art in(ter)vention into the contemporary parchment making industry, offering an alternative to the current reliance on industrial agriculture and re-turning it to the land, the people, and the animals they tend.
Shoshana is the Creative Director of Co/Lab: ReImagine Jewish where she co-founded and directs Art/Lab, a contemporary Jewish artists fellowship. She is the Founding Artist and Co-Curator of the Greensboro Contemporary Jewish Museum and its Social Practice Institute for Southern Jewish Artists in Greensboro, NC.
After 20 years in Israel, Shoshana now resides with her partner and children and their rescue dog in the Dyer Street Shtetl, a NorthEast Portland, OR intentional community. There she co-directs and co-curates the Gug(g)enheim Portland in their family residence. Shoshana speaks, teaches and consults internationally.
Shoshana is grateful to have had her work supported by the Covenant Foundation, CANVAS, The Greater Greensboro Arts Council, The Jewish Federation of Greensboro, NC, The University of NC Jewish Studies Department, the Oregon Arts Commission, The Ford Family Foundation, the Regional Arts and Culture Council (Portland, OR), Targum Shlishi, The Hadassah Brandeis Institute, The Eugene and Estelle Ferkauf Foundation, The Eicholz Foundation, The Simon Benson Foundation, The Gottesman Foundation, the Zachs Family Foundation and many other private donors and institutions.
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Founder
https://www.adamcarlin.us/Adam Carlin is an artist, arts administrator, curator, and educator. As Executive Director of Women of the Shoah, Carlin leads a non-profit merging Holocaust education with public art. He is also Co-Director and Co-Founder of A Contemporary Jewish Museum, an organization establishing innovative and experimental Jewish museums in unexpected places.
Previously, he served as Director of Learning & Engagement at the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, NY, and held dual positions at UNC Greensboro as Director of Community Engagement for the College of Visual and Performing Arts and Director of the off-campus contemporary art center, Greensboro Project Space. Carlin also co-founded and co-directed Creek Colleges, which created schools on the banks of watersheds undergoing active restoration, and Some Thing Spacious, an experimental project space in Oakland, CA that focused on participatory art practices. He holds a BFA in Sculpture from California College of the Arts and an MFA in Art and Social Practice from Portland State University.
His curatorial and artistic work includes projects at Open Engagement Queens Museum, Portland City Hall, Elsewhere Living Museum, ZERO1 Museum, Georgia State University, Bennett College, the City of Raleigh, and UC Davis. Carlin has lectured at numerous institutions, including Appalachian State University’s Center for Judaic, Holocaust and Peace Studies, San Francisco Art Institute, Syracuse University, SOMA Mexico City, Universität der Künste Berlin, UMass Dartmouth, and the Big Bold Jewish Climate Fest. His work has been supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, Andy Warhol Foundation, Boeheim Foundation, HumanitiesNY, Covenant Foundation, Mellon Foundation, and Joseph M. Bryan Foundation.
A Contemporary Jewish Museum is honored to have collaborated with the following:
Elsewhere Museum, Greensboro Project Space, Greensboro Jewish Federation, B’nai Shalom Jewish Day School of Greensboro, Scuppernong Books, Hazon Inc., Carolina Jews for Justice, The Jewish Farmers Network, the Greensboro History Museum, the Museum of Southern Jewish Experience, and the University of North Carolina Greensboro archivists, Religious Studies Department, Museum Studies Department and the College of Visual and Performing Arts. Our Greensboro Contemporary Jewish Museum is recognized among established Jewish museums through the Weitzman National Museum of American Jewish History and as participating members of the Council of American Jewish Museums.
