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Power to the people

I’ve just returned from a busman’s holiday in San Francisco where I ate myself silly, walked until my shins ached and talked and talked -- with former GW students and their families (what a treat!), with colleagues, with friends -- until my voice turned into a veritable foghorn.

Contemporary Jewish Museum
Contemporary Jewish Museum/Menachem Wecker

I had come to San Francisco at the invitation of the Contemporary Jewish Museum to give a presentation about the relationship between mid-century design and the Jewish experience, the subject of a current exhibition “Designing Home: Jews and Midcentury Design.” For years now, I’ve been interested in the ways in which taste and style are as much collective phenomena as individual ones and am grateful to the museum for the opportunity to share some of my thoughts on the topic.

What really galvanized me, though, was the Contemporary Jewish Museum itself. Housed in a former power station that once provided electricity to downtown San Francisco and fortuitously located in a bustling area of San Francisco -- the Yerba Buena district -- that draws visitors and natives alike, the museum is a monument to thinking big.

But it’s not just the museum’s compelling location or its visually arresting architecture that powers the imagination. What really gets things going is the institution’s commitment to re-conceptualizing the ways in which museums might function these days.

Taking its cue from teaching hospitals, the Contemporary Jewish Museum likens itself to a teaching museum. Under the innovative stewardship of its new executive director, Lori Starr, it doesn’t just mount exhibitions, dispense information or engage in creative programming (an “Out of Order Seder,” anyone?). Without a permanent collection of its own, the CJM, as it’s called, places more of a premium on process than on display, on exposure more than exhortation, on collaboration in lieu of showmanship. It invites participation at every turn, from commissioning artwork and sponsoring pop-up stores like Dwell, a timely response to its current exhibition, to bringing educators together with technologists so that they might benefit from one another’s company.

In the course of things, the CJM reverses the traditional relationship between the front of the house and the back of the house, between what is known and how we know it, underscoring the primacy of discovery. It calls on the viewer as much as the curator to make connections.

What a concept! Here’s hoping the notion of a teaching museum given over to Jewish culture in all of its many manifestations will serve as a beacon bright from coast to coast.

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