The Magnes opens for the fall

The Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life at the University of California, Berkeley opens on Tuesday, August 27, for the fall 2024 semester with a new exhibition, In Plain Sight: Jewish Arts and Lives in the Muslim World.

Co-curated by Magnes Curator Dr. Francesco Spagnolo and scholar of Islamic art Dr. Qamar Adamjee, In Plain Sight showcases Jewish objects originating from Muslim lands that reflect cultural affinities and common threads.

Along with In Plain Sight, The Magnes has the following additional exhibitions and installations on display this academic year:

Time Capsules: Exploring the Permanent Collection is both a retrospective and an examination of the role of cultural heritage collections in imagining the future of Jewish memory. This installation showcases a selection of 10 exhibitions from the museum’s first 10 years at UC Berkeley.

The inaugural installation from the Roman Vishniac Archive, An Archive of Archives: Roman Vishniac’s Exhibition History | New York, 1971-72 shares some of Vishniac’s most iconic images documenting Jewish life and communities in Eastern Europe before the Holocaust. 

In the permanent collection installation, artist and UC Berkeley Professor Greg Niemeyer’s contemporary work, GifCollider: Chapter 11. Night Vision, is an ever changing image tracing the shape of the menorah in a sea of GIF animations—layering, moving, and blurring them to suggest stratas of digital memory.

The museum will be open to the public Sundays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays from 11:00 am to 4:00 pm and open late on Thursdays from 11:00 am to 7:00 pm. Admission is free.

The Magnes is located one block from UC Berkeley and one block from the Downtown Berkeley BART station at 2121 Allston Way in Berkeley.