February 14–May 27, 2013
African American artist Kehinde Wiley is known for vibrant, large-scale paintings of hip men of color rendered in the self-confident poses typical of classical European portraiture. The first major exhibition of Wiley’s work in San Francisco, The World Stage: Israel is part of the artist’s bold series exploring the black diaspora. The portraits are complemented by a selection of historical Jewish textiles and works on paper from which the artist drew inspiration.
Jewish Life in the Bay Area from the Gold Rush to the Present
November 17, 2011–April 28, 2013
From Levi’s® blue jeans to the Sutro Baths, Gump’s to Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, the story of the Bay Area’s Jewish community is the story of the region itself. The first exhibition of its kind, California Dreaming explores Jewish life in the Bay Area from the Gold Rush to the present and demonstrates how it is informed by the pioneering, entrepreneurial spirit of the many Jews who came out West in the booming decades that began with the Gold Rush.
February 16–September 9, 2012
Do Not Destroy: Trees, Art, and Jewish Thought is an exciting opportunity to explore the subject of the tree in Jewish tradition through the lens of contemporary artists who enable us to see the world in new ways and to encourage us to find fresh meaning in tradition.
May 12, 2011–September 6, 2011
Drawing upon a wealth of rarely seen artistic and archival materials, Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories illuminates Stein's life and pivotal role in art during the 20th century.
Through August 28, 2012
Hagar in the Desert (1969), the last monumental bronze cubist sculptor Jacques Lipchitz created before his death, will be on view on the Museum’s second floor in a small exhibition examining the many ways Western religions and artists interpret the meaning of this fascinating story from the Torah.
March 31–July 2011
Are We There Yet? is a new media art installation in the Museum's Yud Gallery by Bay Area artists Ken Goldberg and Gil Gershoni that celebrates inquisitive impulse. An immersive sound environment, the installation poses questions from a variety of sources including the Talmud, literature, and popular culture. Questions vary based on visitors’ movement through the space.
October 29, 2010–March 29, 2011
Rarely-seen Old Master paintings reveal the legacy of a preeminent Jewish art dealer whose vast collection was looted by the Nazis. Discover a dramatic story of great art, injustice and reclamation.
April 22–October 3, 2010
The first major international exhibition to examine the reinvention of Jewish ritual in art and design.
The Torah Project
October 8, 2009–March 29, 2011
As It Is Written: Project 304,805 is centered around a soferet (professionally trained female scribe) who, while on public view, will write out the entire text of the Torah over the course of a full year.
A photographic journey through the streets of Germany
June 18, 2009 - August 18, 2009
There are 303 roads, streets, and paths in Germany, whose names refer to a Jewish presence. Artist Susan Hiller has visited all of them over a three-year period, filming and taking photographs of these historically evocative places.
The Dorothy Saxe Invitational
February 27, 2009 - June 2, 2009
Continuing its long-standing tradition of engaging artists from myriad backgrounds to rethink, reshape and redefine traditional Jewish ritual objects, the Contemporary Jewish Museum has invited eighty leading local and national artists to creatively explore the meaning and form of the Passover seder plate.
Adi Nes: Biblical Stories and Yael Bartana: Short Memory
January 30 - March 17, 2009
Dateline 09 inaugurates a new series of exhibitions that provide a forum for the Museum to respond to the latest developments in today's rapidly changing world. The exhibition will feature presentations of work by two of today's leading artists- photographer Adi Nes and video artist Yael Bartana.
June 8, 2008 - February 1, 2009
Acclaimed musician John Zorn curates a series of original sound pieces based on a letter of the Hebrew alphabet by such leading musicians and composers as Lou Reed, Laurie Anderson, Erik Frielander, Chris Brown, and Terry Riley.
June 8 - September 7, 2008
Celebrating the "King of Cartoons", this exhibition features a wide selection of original drawings from William Steig's long acclaimed career as both a brilliant cartoonist for The New Yorker and an award-winning, beloved author of children's literature.
Young Photographers Explore Culture, Community, and Self, featuring new works by young photographers.
May 10 - 20, 2007
See how teens inspired by The Jewish Identity Project created their own photographic exploration of personal identity. Projects on view include interview-based portraits of friends and family, symbolic self-portraits, and photographic series depicting significant rituals. The youth involved in this project acted as both artists and curators.
April 4, 2006 - July 30, 2006
The Contemporary Jewish Museum is proud to present Art of Living: Contemporary Photography and Video from the Israel Museum, an exhibition of dynamic and engaging photographs and video works produced by 20 contemporary Israeli artists. The exhibition presents approximately 40 works from the permanent collections of the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.
May 4, 2005 - September 5, 2005
In the longstanding tradition of the Museum, the Invitational encourages artists of all backgrounds from around the country to make us think afresh by creating original interpretations of traditional Jewish ritual objects using a variety of media.
March 7, 2004 - June 27, 2004
100 Artists See God is a traveling exhibition organized by Independent Curators International. The guest co-curators, artists John Baldessari and Meg Cranston, are tackling the ever-challenging question of God in this exhibition. Baldessari and Cranston have invited 100 artists to respond to one of art's most enduring challenges: picturing the divine.
October 27, 2002 - February 16, 2003
Stephanie Snyder's site-specific installation, Hamakom (The Place), was at its heart a personal response to the essences and contradictions of Jerusalem's Western Wall. Created through a process deeply influenced by Jewish ritual, it was a poetic re-imagining of sacred space.
March 21, 2002 - June 30, 2002
Enter the irreverent world of comic strip artist Ben Katchor, and meet the hilarious characters who live there, at the Contemporary Jewish Museum's West Coast premiere exhibition of Katchor's illustrations, graphic novels, set designs and drawings. Explore his quirky, Yiddish-inflected cartoon metropolis, home to implausible heroes and oddly nostalgic places, all created by an artist pushing the boundaries of the comic strip into new, soulful terrain.
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 November 15, 2012–February 24, 2013
The Snowy Day and the Art of Ezra Jack Keats is the first major exhibition in the United States to pay tribute to award-winning author and illustrator Ezra Jack Keats (1916–1983), whose beloved children’s books include Whistle for Willie(1964), Peter’s Chair (1967), and The Snowy Day (1962)—the first modern full-color picture book to feature an African American protagonist.
October 11, 2012–January 21, 2013
In 1936 a group of young, idealistic photographers, most of them Jewish, first-generation Americans, formed an organization in Manhattan called the Photo League. Their solidarity centered on a belief in the expressive power of the documentary photograph and on a progressive alliance in the 1930s of socialist ideas and art. The Radical Camera: New York's Photo League, 1936–1951 presents the contested path of the documentary photograph during a tumultuous period that spanned the New Deal reforms of the Depression, World War II, and the Cold War.
October 2, 2011–January 16, 2012
The first art exhibition in an American art museum on this master magician,Houdini: Art and Magic explores how Houdini's role as an American icon was transformed across three centuries: first in the late 19th century by the artist’s own interpretation of himself; by popular culture in the 20th century; and today by contemporary artists who conjure Houdini as an audacious performer and showman of raw physicality.
April 7, 2011–August 28, 2011
The Contemporary Jewish Museum is celebrating an oft-overlooked chapter in sports history, the decades of Jewish Ping Pong domination that followed World War I, with The Ping Pong Project. The free, temporary installation of regulation tables and equipment allows anyone to take a shot at table tennis triumph during regular Museum hours.
March 31, 2011–October 16, 2011
Charlotte Salomon, a young Jewish artist from Berlin, worked feverishly between 1940 and 1942 to produce approximately 1300 paintings before she was arrested by the Nazis in 1943, transported to Auschwitz, and killed at the age of 26. The gouaches make up Life? or Theatre?, which through imagery and text tells the slightly fictionalized and theatrically imagined story of Salomon’s family.
November 14, 2010–March 13, 2011
Curious George, the impish monkey protagonist of many adventures, may never have seen the light of day if it were not for the determination and courage of his creators, the illustrator H. A. Rey and his wife, author and artist Margret Rey. The exhibition features nearly 80 original drawings of the beloved monkey and other characters, a look at the Reys’ escape from Nazi Europe, and more.
July 1–October 26, 2010
The first museum survey of Maira Kalman’s narrative art. Working as an illustrator, author, and designer, Kalman illuminates contemporary life with a profound sense of joy and a unique sense of humor. Kalman’s art appears everywhere in the foreground of today’s visual culture.
February 11–June 15, 2010
Artist Linda Ellia confronted Adolph Hitler’s Mein Kampf by inviting both artists and the general public to respond to the text by altering one of the books 600 pages.
September 8, 2009 - January 19, 2010
Maurice Sendak has written or illustrated more than 100 picture books over his 60-year career. A number of those books inspired generations of children and changed the landscape of picture books. This major retrospective sheds light on
April 23, 2009 - September 7, 2009
Devoted to the extraordinary artwork created for Russian Jewish theater productions in the 1920s and 1930s, this exhibition will bring to light a remarkable period in the early years of the Soviet Union when innovative visual artists, including Marc Chagall, Natan Altman, and Robert Falk, joined forces with avant-garde playwrights, actors, and theatrical producers.
And You Shall Know Us by the Trail of Our Vinyl
February 6, 2009 - August 22, 2010
Jews on Vinyl is a unique exhibition based on Josh Kun and Roger Bennett's new book: And You Shall Know Us by the Trail of Our Vinyl: The Jewish Past as Told by the Records We Have Loved and Lost, which spans the history of Jewish recorded music from the 1940s to the 1980s, weaving an account that begins with sacred songs and ends with the holy trinity of Neil, Barbra, and Barry.
October 12, 2008 - February 3, 2009
On view for the first time on the West Coast, Andy Warhol’s original paintings from his extraordinary series, Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century, which portrays a pantheon of great Jewish thinkers, politicians, performers, musicians, and writers.
June 8, 2008 - January 6, 2009
The exhibition pairs seven new artist commissions, including works by Matthew Ritchie, Ben Rubin and Shirley Shor, with a range of historically important works by Marc Chagall, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo and others in order to explore our changing understanding of the story of creation as depicted in Genesis Chapter 1.
Exhibition on view June 8, 2008 – October 18, 2011
Discover the many different ways of “being Jewish” in the Bay Area through this mural of community photos, and objects which reflect the flavor of Jewish life in the Bay Area, both past and present.
October 22, 2006 - April 29, 2007
The Contemporary Jewish Museum presents The Jewish Identity Project: New American Photography, featuring newly commissioned photography, video, and multimedia projects by thirteen emerging and mid-career artists. The exhibition explores the hybrid and complex racial, national, and cultural identity of contemporary Americans through a Jewish lens.
October 23, 2005 - February 26, 2006
The Contemporary Jewish Museum is honored to be the only U.S. venue forIntersections, an interfaith, intercontinental, and interactive exploration of the changing issues of women and faith.
October 14, 2004 - February 27, 2005
From Rome to New York, India to Yemen, Buenos Aires to Bukhara, since 1978, Brenner has recorded the Jewish Diaspora in over 40 countries on five continents. The French photographer, trained as a social anthropologist, has comprised the most extensive record of Jewish life ever created by a single individual as well as chronicled one of the oldest and most diverse peoples.
October 27, 2002 - February 16, 2003
Sharing the Screen was a compilation of film and video excerpts selected by outgoing Jewish Film Festival director, Janis Plotkin, because together they formed a kaleidoscope of cinematic responses to Israeli-Arab relationships over the festival's lifespan. Beginning with Hamsin (1983), the first Israeli feature to focus on Palestinian-Israeli conflict over land, the films spanned the first Intifada (uprising) of the late 1980s, the hopeful period of the Oslo accords (post-1993), their breakdown, and then a second Intifada.
Time Capsule from San Francisco's Lost Sanctuary
September 21, 2002 - February 16, 2003
On Bush Street, an 1895 San Francisco synagogue was about to be renovated as part of a Japanese American assisted living facility. The cornerstone of Congregation Ohabai Shalome, and the time capsule it contained, were opened for the first time in more than a century. The mysteries that lay hidden were on view in this exhibition, which today is the oldest standing synagogue building in San Francisco.
November 14, 2001 - January 31, 2002
The exhibition Face(t)s of Memoryexplored and challenged the power of the photograph to preserve fragments of personal memory. On view were works by contemporary artists Christian Boltanski and Marcelo Brodsky, juxtaposed with a selection of family albums, archival photographs and personal memorabilia from the Judah L. Magnes Museum collection.
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