Travel through some of the most electrifying moments in music history through the lens of Bay Area–based photographer Jay Blakesberg. RetroBlakesberg: The Music Never Stopped presents photographs of legendary musicians that reveal the evolution of San Francisco’s unique music culture and its wide-reaching influence. Featuring images of the Grateful Dead, Joni Mitchell, Tracy Chapman, Neil Young, Soundgarden, and many more alongside original tickets stubs, press passes, and other ephemera, this exhibition invites visitors to experience an electrifying visual history of the sounds and stories that have shaped the Bay Area and beyond.

The Contemporary Jewish Museum’s celebrated building, designed by world-renowned architect Daniel Libeskind, has served as an artistic, community, and cultural generator since its opening fifteen years ago. This exhibition delves into the deep symbolism imbued in The CJM’s iconic building. Inspired by the Hebrew phrase l’chaim (“to life”), used most often as a toast to mark moments of togetherness and celebration, the architecture of The CJM’s building embodies the values, traditions, and ideas The Museum explores within its walls. L'Chaim: Celebrating Our Building at 15 explores the multitude of symbols layered in the space we inhabit, unlocking the meaning behind its dynamic energy and allowing all who visit to experience the space anew.  

Bay Area artist Annie Albagli’s expansive video-based installation draws on Jewish tradition, local geography, and ritual to respond to a time of widespread isolation and a desire for human connection. Situated in The CJM’s intimate Black Box Gallery, the installation combines overlaid imagery and field recordings of the Marin headlands with crashing waves and Jewish ritual objects to offer visitors new ways to move through space, time, and familiar and unfamiliar places. Displayed for the first time in a solo museum exhibition, Albagli’s work both draws on and decontextualizes Jewish stories and local histories to break boundaries, explore our interdependence with each other and our world, and offer ways in which viewers can reimagine notions of space and self.  

The teen years are instrumental in the creation of a sense of self. They are also a critical time in the creation of what psychologists from The Family Narrative Lab at Emory University call the “intergenerational self”—a self embedded within a larger familial history. In the sixth iteration of What We Hold, teens have created individual audio recordings reflecting on and connecting with their families' stories of love, inheritance, and identity.

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.