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ADMISSION: Free with Museum admission
Artist Stephen Berkman introduces The CJM audience to his solo exhibition, Predicting the Past: Zohar Studios, The Lost Years. Enjoy Berkman’s insights into the legend of Zohar Studios, a mythopoetic nineteenth-century photography studio in the Lower East Side and learn about the specialized techniques that went into the making of the photographs in the exhibition.
Los Angeles–based artist Stephen Berkman’s immersive photography installation is a tribute to Shimmel Zohar, a nineteenth-century Jewish immigrant, photographer, and founder of the enigmatic Zohar Studios in New York City. The exhibition includes over thirty photographs, several large installations, a cabinet of curiosities, and an artist book about the Zohar project. These uncanny photographs take the visual codes of nineteenth-century portraiture as their point of departure, and the images and objects address both Jewish life and the state of scientific understanding over 150 years ago.
Predicting the Past: Zohar Studios, The Lost Years is organized by The Contemporary Jewish Museum. Leadership support is generously provided by Maribelle and Stephen Leavitt, The Bernard Osher Foundation, and the John Pritzker Family Fund. Major support is provided by Joyce B. Linker and Dorothy R. Saxe.
Media Sponsorship is provided by the San Francisco Chronicle.
Stephen Berkman, Zohar’s Voyage (detail), undated. Albumen print, 11x 14 in.