It is my pleasure to share some great news with you; the show I curated in Brooklyn NY, back in October titled “Chassidim of Color” will be featured on Oprah’s new show ‘Oprahs next chapter’. The show explores the Chassidic community in Brooklyn and is titled First Look: America’s Hidden Culture.
The “Chassidim of Color” art show was a great success bringing together members of the Chassidic community who are artists to display their work.
The show grew out of a desire to share the work of David Ariel De Guglielmi (see last post) at first I had modest ideas but then it morphed in to renting a store front in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. The holiday of Sukkot was fast approaching and there would be thousands of people on the streets a great opportunity to share work. I put out a call to arts looking for Chassidic artist, with less than a week to opening and received 15 applicants. We hung the show and it was just amazing, the space was supposed to close at 2AM but I could not get people out till about 4AM there was such a hunger for the arts. The amazing thing is that artist just came off the street wanting to be part of it, from a 13 year old boy with string art to a 70+ year old lady with digital art.
During the show, Oprah’s film crew stopped in to take it in and interview me on what it is all about. That clip has made it in to Oprah’s show to be screened on February 15 as part of the second episode.
Check out the show’s trailer
To give you more background, below is an article about the ‘Chassidim of Color’ show by Mackenzie Issler.
‘Local rabbi brings together Hasidic artists to showcase their talent’
By MACKENZIE ISSLER
Hasidic Jews are better known for their conservative, dark clothing than for canvases of color. Rabbi Yitzchok Moully, an artist, wanted to change that.
Last week, Moully, a 33-year-old rabbi in New Jersey, organized a four-day art exhibit in Crown Heights that brought together about 15 Hasidic artists who paint in vibrant and rich hues. The event was timed to coincide with the holiday of Sukkot, which in religious Jewish communities involves several nights of dancing and celebrating on the streets. Sukkot brought together hundreds of locals and people from all over the world to Crown Heights, home of the Lubavitch World Headquarters, the epicenter of Hasidic Orthodox Judaism.
Just after midnight Tuesday, music boomed through the densely populated Hasidic neighborhood, as Hasidic men, dressed in long, black coats and black, fur hats, joined hands and danced in circles. Women congregated on the sidewalks, watching the merriment.
A block away, Moully, wearing his signature bright pink yarmulke, greeted passers-by who entered the art gallery. A steady stream of people walked through the exhibit, dressed in dark clothing, a stark contrast to the bright pink, yellow, blue and green paintings displayed on the walls.
Moully’s goal was to raise awareness of Hasidic artists in Jewish community and to bring together Hasidic artists who may have never met before.
“For the most part, art is not taught in Hasidic schools, and in public schools, art tends to be cut,” Moully said. “Creative expression is celebrated, but it could be celebrated even more.”
Moully rented the empty store for five days, and he and the artists transformed the barren room; nearly every square inch of wall space was covered with portraits, abstract works and some photography. The gallery was open noon to 2 a.m., Sunday through Tuesday and until mid-day on Wednesday, shortly before Sukkot ended.
The holiday is a celebration of the harvest and a reminder of the Jews’ exodus from slavery in Egypt. During Sukkot, Jews build temporary huts outside their homes. These makeshift structures filled the small lawns in Crown Heights.
The exhibit’s artists came from Crown Heights and across the globe.
Chaya Teleshevsky, a 23-year-old full-time art student from Melbourne, Australia, went to Crown Heights a few weeks ago to celebrate the holidays with extended family. Moully contacted her and invited her to be in the show. She said she was surprised by Moully’s call, but thought the exhibit was a great opportunity for her as an aspiring artist.
This was her second exhibit, but her first one in the United States. She chose two of her oil paintings to display. One showed two Hasidic men playing chess, and though the foreground was painted in black, white and gray hues, the background was a vibrant sky of reds, yellows, oranges and purples meticulously blended to produce a glowing sunset.
She said the exhibition gave the artists more exposure and showed people their talents.
“You see how diverse and different people are in their art and how colorful it is,” she said.
Moully’s work, which combines bold colors with Judaic images, was in the exhibit too: a series of three paintings of a dreidel, a four-sided top used during the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah. He painted each dreidel a different color — bright blue, green and purple; the backgrounds were equally vibrant in eye-popping shades of pink, orange and yellow.
Many of the artists incorporated religious imagery into their work, but 23-year-old Sarah Stone’s work stood out, because hers were some of the only abstract pieces. One of her paintings was a patchwork of oranges, yellows and blues blending together from top to bottom.
Stone, who lives in Crown Heights, started painting when she was in a Jewish high school in California. Her school didn’t offer art, so she experimented with colors and techniques in her dorm room. She is now studying fine arts at Brooklyn College.
The exhibit drew artists Hasidic artists from the surrounding areas. By the end of the show, Moully said he filled four pages of paper with names of artists he had never previously met.
“I’m surprised how many Hasidic artists I wasn’t aware of,” he said. “I was living under my rock like everyone else under theirs.”
Around 1 a.m. on Tuesday, husband and wife Yisroel and Louiza Frankforter, both Hasidic Jews dressed in dark clothing, entered the gallery after they noticed it while walking past.
The Miami couple visiting Crown Heights for the holidays admired the artwork, leaning in to get closer looks at some of the paintings. “It shows the world a different aspect of Judaism,” said Yisroel Frankforter.
Moully finally locked the gallery’s doors around 4 a.m., even though he had intended to close two hours earlier. “I couldn’t close,” he said. “People just kept coming in.”
Every day he said more artists came by and asked if they could participate. A 13-year-old boy put up a piece of his work and it sold A woman in her 80s hung up one her paintings.
“The community was starving for something like this,” Moully said.
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We need exhibitions of this nature in cities throughout the world.