The CJM is pleased to present the only appearance of Roz Chast’s Cartoon Memoirs retrospective exhibition outside of New York and Massachusetts. Chast is one of the most celebrated and beloved cartoonists working in the United States today; she has been publishing with The New Yorker since 1978. Her 2014 graphic memoir Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? deals with the difficult subject of caring for aging parents.

Cary Leibowitz: Museum Show is the first comprehensive career survey and solo museum exhibition devoted to the New York-based contemporary artist, Cary Leibowitz (b. 1963). Since the early 1990s Leibowitz has carried on with an interdisciplinary practice that turns a critical eye on subjects of identity, modernism, the art market, queer politics, and kitsch. The exhibition features nearly 350 original artworks and multiples from 1987 to the present: paintings, commercially manufactured multiples, works on paper, archival material, and fabric works and will be accompanied by a hardcover catalog with newly commissioned contributions. 

The Yud Video Project features twenty-five short videos that were selected among more than 700 submissions, and that altogether present a wide range of interpretation of what memory means today. Artists of all backgrounds were encouraged to submit their videos of five minutes or less to be shown in the stunning Stephen & Maribelle Leavitt Yud Gallery.

In a series of audio stories, The Museum’s Teen Art Connect interns share a layered quilt of myth and memory from the perspective of Bay Area teens in 2016. Exploring their own family narratives allowed these students to claim and understand how moments of the past transform, beyond memories, into relationships and outlooks in the present.

Bay Area visual artist Kota Ezawa partners with San Francisco native James Kirby Rogers, a contemporary dancer at The Houston Ballet II. The pair create a video animation based on Rogers’ choreography and movements, which he performs in front of Ezawa’s camera. Their collaboration, Much Ado About Nothing, as a synthesis of two art forms, blurs the line between tangible human movements and the imaginative powers enabled by digital animation.

The Contemporary Jewish Museum commissioned artwork by Sacramento-based artist Dave Lane to be placed in its soaring lobby space. The massive sculpture, entitled Lamp of the Covenant, is a 90-foot-long, six ton work suspended high over the heads of visitors. Attached to an enormous oval of steel are antique objects: world globes, light bulbs, tools such as nineteenth century apple peelers and blow torches, and various other objects that suggest the unfolding marvels of the cosmos.