Special Weekend Opening on CalDay!
April 18 & 19, 11AM-4PM
ON VIEW THIS SPRING:
The Future of Memory: Jewish Culture in the Digital Age
What should we remember? What should we forget? And who decides? An innovative project that includes an installation, a museum exhibition, and a digital research lab in which museum professionals, scholars, students, and the public, discuss the meaning of memory, the many facets of digital history, and the ways in which we use computers and the Internet to enhance our global understanding of Jewish cultural heritage. Read more…
The Secret Language of Flowers: Botanical Drawings from Israel, 1949-1950
In 1984, The Magnes acquired a portfolio of botanical drawings by Shmuel Lerner, a Ukraine-born amateur artist from California. While Lerner’s biography and many details surrounding this work remain obscure, his drawings open for us a unique window into the landscape, the history and the languages of Israel in the period immediately following the establishment of the State. The exhibition features a selection of 26 botanical drawings from 1949, complete with the author’s annotations about plants, places, and language. Read more…
Gourmet Ghettos: Modern Food Rituals
Over 150 objects from around the world, ranging from cookware, tableware, and kitchen textiles to books, manuscripts, paintings and drawings, document Jewish food rituals as meaningful frameworks with which to contextualize today’s food movement, a phenomenon that is deeply embedded in Berkeley’s history, a city with its own “gourmet ghetto.” Read more…
The Jewish World | A Book Installation
The Jewish World: 100 Treasures of Art and Culture, published by Skirà-Rizzoli in the Fall of 2014, is the first comprehensive catalog featuring the holdings of The Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life. Select pages from this lavishly illustrated volume populate an installation in the Auditorium of The Magnes. Buy The Jewish World.