Fine art is always on display at the JCC.
The JCC Taube Center for Jewish Peoplehood mounts multi-media art shows four times a year, presenting both local and international Jewish artists. These seasonal exhibitions highlight a variety of themes pertinent to the Jewish calendar, holidays, values, text, and traditions.
The exhibitions have featured work from prominent artists including Lawrence Kushner, Siona Benjamin, Laurie Wohl, Lauren Bartone, MIND the HEART!, Hillel Smith, and many others.
Exhibitions are well publicized and are enjoyed by all who visit the JCC.
Current Exhibit
Presenting through August 30, 2023
Keren Katz
An Israeli Comic Artist
Keren Katz is a cartoonist, writer, and the non-fictitious half of The Katz Sisters Duo. She is a graduate of the School of Visual Arts’s MFA Illustration Program and Bezalel Academy in Jerusalem. She is the author of two graphic novels: The Academic Hour and The Backstage of a Dishwashing Webshow (Secret Acres) and was nominated for the SPX Ignatz Award for Outstanding Artist. Her work has been published in anthologies by Fantagraphics, Smoke Signal, Locust Moon, Rough House, Ink Brick, Retrofit Comics, The Brooklyn Rail, kuš!, Carrier Pigeon and Seven Stories Press. Katz is the 2018-2019 Center for Cartoon Studies fellow, and recipient of the SVA Alumni Society 2013 Micro-Grant, the Sequential Artists Workshop’s 2014 Micro Grant, the Museum of Comics and Cartoon Art’s 2015 Silver Medal and Award of Excellence, the 2018 Slate Book Review and the Center for Cartoon Studies sixth annual Cartoonist Studio Prize for Best Print Comic (The Academic Hour) and the Cartoon Crossroad Columbus Emerging Talent Prize. She is part of Gnat Micro Press-a non profit community for publishing experimental poetry and comics and the Tel-Aviv based Humdrum Comics Collective.
To honor Israel at 75, the Osher Marin JCC is excited to exhibit the drawings of Keren Katz, an Israeli comic artist who creates work based on choreography and performances. The drawings exhibited represent work created for the graphic novels The Academic Hour, The Backstage of a Dishwashing Webshow, Chapter Two and The Raindrop Prelude. Although the drawings represent four different stories, they each share a similar process, more akin to choreography than narrative storytelling. Keren Katz shares, “The large formats and intricate patterns comprising them allow me to experiment widely with movements and spatial compositions. I usually describe the narrative in all those books as ‘stories of unrequited love set in architecturally unsound spaces.’ This also refers to the architecture of my narratives being more of an improvisation on the page and across pages and the book format.” We hope you enjoy Keren’s works exhibited both on our walls and in book format.
More about Keren’s process from The Comics Journal (Issue #305, edited by RJ Casey):
“Before I studied visual art, my early sketchbooks were filled with ideas for choreographies. Nowadays, my sketchbooks don’t disclose the fact that I have migrated into a new medium. They still consist of micro-story clumps which I translate into movement, record myself dancing, and draw the movement from the reference photos. I obsessively fill an area with intricate patterns or swirl my arms around to create negative spaces. The drawing process also includes dance breaks to relieve back and shoulder tension and imagining the existence of an audience reading over my shoulder and making sure I am always sitting in an interesting pose.
The final stage of composing a book is arranging all the images as abstract sequences on the floor. I look for harmonies, motifs or contrasts in the motion and sever the threads of their original inspiration. My stories are mostly about the consequences of obsessive rituals and the deconstruction of space through dysfunctions of the body and emotion. The characters are always interchangeable, their relationships are hallucinated or suspended in dream, their eyelids closed and their faces generic and expressionless in order to highlight the gesture as the force driving them through the narrative, and not the other way around- a misplaced or reversed ‘expression.’ I leave negative spaces in order to return to those images with a new story.”
Gallery Submission Guidelines and Information
If you are interested in applying to display your art in the Osher Marin JCC Gallery, please contact us and we will send you a PDF of the application and guidelines.
Past Exhibits
Exhibits held from 2013 to 2023
