Art stars of David

David Altmejd, The Settler (detail), 2005.

Photo: Tom Powel

There’s an old joke that says, “Two Jews, three opinions.” The 16 Jews in “The New Authentics: Artists of the Post-Jewish Generation” present significantly more than 24—hardly surprising when you consider their diverse perspectives. Most were born in the 1960s or 1970s, but their levels of Jewish education and affiliation vary: A few grew up in observant families; others have a non-Jewish parent; a couple are converts. Some are people of color. Several are from Chicago, but the majority live in Los Angeles, New York City or Europe. Some engage Jewish concerns or values directly; others don’t seem to address religion or ethnicity at all.

Senior curator Staci Boris explains that this multicultural, eclectic assemblage is exactly what she wanted for the inaugural exhibition at the Spertus Museum’s new facility. “It needed to explore American-Jewish identity in the 21st century,” she says. “What does it mean to be Jewish today?”

What “The New Authentics” artists have in common, according to Boris, is a penchant for “questioning,” and an emphasis on hybrid art forms and materials that reflect their hyphenated backgrounds. Having worked at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art for 13 years before joining the Spertus in 2004, Boris was already familiar with some of these artists when she began curating the exhibition, and realized that none had been placed in an explicitly “Jewish” context before. She was surprised by their openness to the suggestion. “They were really interested in having their work discussed this way,” she recalls.

Readers may recognize Collier Schorr, whose photographs examine ideas about masculinity; Karl Haendel, who creates meticulous drawings of consumer goods; and David Altmejd, who represented Canada at the 2007 Venice Biennale with an installation of shiny mirrors and taxidermied animals. They refer to Judaism rarely, if ever, but their work does take on new meanings when considered together: Altmejd’s disco-fabulous dead “werewolves,” for example, represent a metamorphosis relevant to a Jewish community that’s constantly evolving and impossible to define.

Some artists’ connections to their faith are more overt. Lilah Freedland’s hilarious Hebrew School Pin-Ups pose sultry brunets in soft-porn clichés with a twist best appreciated by hormonal bar mitzvah boys. In one photograph, a pouting, bikini-clad babe stands by the side of the road holding a sign that says, israel or bust. In another, a suntanned young woman frolics in the ocean with a bunch of parsley in a highly unorthodox version of a Passover ritual. In spilling out of their clothes, they escape the Jewish mother/princess dichotomy beloved of Philip Roth.

Other artists touch on more predictable subjects like the Holocaust: Johanna Bresnick’s installation Ohne Lebensraum places a sculpture of the artist atop a rug her grandparents acquired during World War II, one of the few things they were able to take when they fled Germany; Schorr’s Forests and Fields series includes photographs of young German men in Nazi uniforms—transgressive not only for the Jewish artist, but for the teenage subjects who were forbidden from wearing or even seeing such garments. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict crops up in Shoshana Dentz’s paintings and prints, which are dominated by images of kaffiyehs, chain-link fences and barbed wire. Such works are full of sympathy for “the other side,” perhaps because “The New Authentics” only seems to focus on a particular group. Its questions about home, heritage and displacement are universal.

“The New Authentics” runs Friday 30 through April 13.