A guidebook to the most current trends in contemporary Jewish art and design, Reinventing Ritual provides an unprecedented look at the work and thought of contemporary artists as they respond to the needs and practices of traditional culture. Beautifully illustrated with new art from Israel, Europe, and the Americas, this publication features both traditional and avant-garde sculpture, textiles, architecture, metalwork, and ceramics by forty leading artists.
Author Daniel Belasco surveys current trends in Jewish ritual art and the influences of feminism, environmentalism, multiculturalism, and new media; Julie Lasky provides a groundbreaking discussion of the role of recycling and social consciousness in contemporary Jewish design; Danya Ruttenberg, a recently ordained rabbi, offers a lively perspective on the constantly evolving Jewish impulse "to concretize the encounter with the Divine"; Arnold M. Eisen writes an absorbing and personal commentary on the role of ritual in Jewish life today; and Tamar Rubin contributes an illustrated timeline covering key Jewish cultural and historical events from 1994 to 2008.

Reinventing Ritual: Contemporary Art and Design for Jewish Life

Arts & Photography

Belasco, Daniel

History & Criticism

Yale University Press

Celebrates the first exhibition devoted to the finely crafted and researched costumes, objects, and drawings that Mary Reid Kelley creates for her visually and intellectually stimulating videos made in collaboration with Patrick Kelley. Mary Reid Kelley celebrates the first museum exhibition devoted to the finely crafted and researched costumes, objects, and drawings that Mary Reid Kelley creates for her visually and intellectually stimulating videos. An essay by curator Daniel Belasco analyzes the sources and significance of the working objects in how they promote the “unreality effect” of Mary Reid Kelley’s videos, which combine both the analog and digital and the personal and historical. A conversation between Corinna Ripps Schaming and Mary Reid Kelley and her long-time collaborator Patrick Kelley reveals insights into their working process. For the first time, the full range of the artist’s costumes, props, drawings, furniture, and accessories are photographed and presented as unique works of art.

Mary Reid Kelley: Working Objects and Videos (Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art)

Pasti, Sara J.

Schaming, Corinna Ripps

Riker, Janet

State University of New York Press

The first scholarly exhibition catalogue of the work of Eugene Speicher (1883-1962), one of the foremost American realists of his generation, who was closely associated with George Bellows, Robert Henri, Leon Kroll, and Rockwell Kent.Called “America’s greatest living painter” by Esquire magazine in 1936, Speicher (1883–1962) was one of the foremost realists of his generation, closely associated with George Bellows, Robert Henri, and Leon Kroll. The exhibition catalogue examines Speicher’s oeuvre, including his artistic development, subject matter, choice of models, influences, and the critical reception of his work. The catalogue contains three essays. The primary essay by curator Valerie Ann Leeds consists of a general assessment and critical review of Speicher’s career and his place in the art world of his day. Another essay authored by Tom Wolf explores Speicher and his relationship to Woodstock. A third essay, by Daniel Belasco, surveys Speicher’s drawings. The catalogue is the first to present a significant body of Speicher’s work in color.

Along His Own Lines: A Retrospective of New York Realist Eugene Speicher (Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art)

Leeds, Valerie Ann

Wolf, Tom

Individual Artists

Redefines McEntee's place in the history of nineteenth-century American landscape painting.Jervis McEntee presents new scholarship and color reproductions that redefine McEntee’s place in the history of nineteenth-century American landscape painting. The lead essay by exhibition curator Lee A. Vedder makes the case that McEntee was far more than a painter of somber late fall landscapes. He set his own course, absorbing influences of his fellow Hudson River school painters including Frederic Church, Sanford Gifford, and Asher B. Durand, while also responding to the atmospheric painting of J. M. W. Turner, the trauma of the Civil War, and the shifts in American tastes to French Barbizon painting and Impressionism. Additional essays expand the scope of McEntee scholarship. Kerry Dean Carso presents the influence of the landscape and industrial development of Rondout (later Kingston), New York, McEntee’s native city. David Schuyler reappraises the art and career of this fascinating artist, who played such a pivotal role in the art and culture of his day. The catalogue also includes reprints of key texts from the rare memorial publication Jervis McEntee: American Landscape Painter (1892).

Jervis McEntee: Painter-Poet of the Hudson River School (Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art)

Carso, Kerry Dean

Vedder, Lee A.

Schuyler, David P.

Lichtenstein Remembered

Gagosian / Rizzoli

Raving In The Desert

Rubin, David S.

Ganihar, Tomer

Auchincloss, Pamela

Photography & Video

Contemporary Arts Center

Women Artists in Midcentury America: A History in Ten Exhibitions

Reaktion Books

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Books by Belasco, Daniel