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The Eulogizer: Jeanette Ingberman, avant-garde art promoter
APPRECIATION JERUSALEM (JTA) -- The Eulogizer highlights the life accomplishments of famous and not-so-famous Jews who have passed away recently. Learn about their achievements, honor their memories and celebrate Jewish lives well lived with The Eulogizer. Write to the Eulogizer at eulogizer@jta.org. Read previous columns here .Jeanette Ingberman, 59, avant-garde art gallery ownerJeanette Ingberman, who championed avant-garde art for decades at a series of New York galleries, died of leukemia Aug. 24 at 59.Ingberman’s Exit Art gallery, in several incarnations throughout lower Manhattan, has presented the challenging, infuriating and unexpected work of myriad artists, united not by style or medium but by their political and post-modern sensibilities. A 2011 exhibit at Exit Art was titled “Fracking: Art and Activism Against the Drill,” which aimed to “expose this process of gas extraction that is contaminating water supplies worldwide” through videos, photography, commissioned works, public responses and literature.Ingberman’s work went beyond even what was happening in non-traditional art galleries and spaces. She said in 2007 that “the ideas we were interested in were not happening in the alternative space scene as it was,” so Exit Art was established as “a hybrid interdisciplinary arts organization dedicated to transcultural, multimedia explorations of contemporary art.”Michael Kaiser, president of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, said Ingberman and her husband, artist Papo Colo, “were tireless in their support of unknown artists who dealt with difficult ideas. Much of what they exhibited was hard for me to understand or appreciate.” Kaiser called Ingberman “one of the great thinkers in the arts world.”
APPRECIATION JERUSALEM (JTA) -- The Eulogizer highlights the life accomplishments of famous and not-so-famous Jews who have passed away recently. Learn about their achievements, honor their memories and celebrate Jewish lives well lived with The Eulogizer. Write to the Eulogizer at eulogizer@jta.org. Read previous columns here .Jeanette Ingberman, 59, avant-garde art gallery ownerJeanette Ingberman, who championed avant-garde art for decades at a series of New York galleries, died of leukemia Aug. 24 at 59.Ingberman’s Exit Art gallery, in several incarnations throughout lower Manhattan, has presented the challenging, infuriating and unexpected work of myriad artists, united not by style or medium but by their political and post-modern sensibilities. A 2011 exhibit at Exit Art was titled “Fracking: Art and Activism Against the Drill,” which aimed to “expose this process of gas extraction that is contaminating water supplies worldwide” through videos, photography, commissioned works, public responses and literature.Ingberman’s work went beyond even what was happening in non-traditional art galleries and spaces. She said in 2007 that “the ideas we were interested in were not happening in the alternative space scene as it was,” so Exit Art was established as “a hybrid interdisciplinary arts organization dedicated to transcultural, multimedia explorations of contemporary art.”Michael Kaiser, president of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, said Ingberman and her husband, artist Papo Colo, “were tireless in their support of unknown artists who dealt with difficult ideas. Much of what they exhibited was hard for me to understand or appreciate.” Kaiser called Ingberman “one of the great thinkers in the arts world.”
Avant-Garde Theater in Iran – Art as Politics, The Politics of Art
To say that art is always political, even when it is not obviously politically engaged, is a truism often used by artists who don’t want to do the difficult work of figuring out, or owning up to, the (usually conservative, in the sense of contributing to the status quo) politics of their art. I hear this truism most commonly from poets who can think of no better response to the question of whether poetry should be politically engaged, and I often think the response is rooted in their own guilt that they do not take on in their work the significant issues of the day. (Of course, there are also poets, not to mention academics, publishers, politicians and others, who are conservative, plain and simple, who refuse to acknowledge that the impulse to poetry often emerges directly from politics, such as those who would lionize a poet like Langston Hughes, but only as long as his work is presented in its most deracinated form.)
To say that art is always political, even when it is not obviously politically engaged, is a truism often used by artists who don’t want to do the difficult work of figuring out, or owning up to, the (usually conservative, in the sense of contributing to the status quo) politics of their art. I hear this truism most commonly from poets who can think of no better response to the question of whether poetry should be politically engaged, and I often think the response is rooted in their own guilt that they do not take on in their work the significant issues of the day. (Of course, there are also poets, not to mention academics, publishers, politicians and others, who are conservative, plain and simple, who refuse to acknowledge that the impulse to poetry often emerges directly from politics, such as those who would lionize a poet like Langston Hughes, but only as long as his work is presented in its most deracinated form.)
Street Style: Jennifer is an Easy, Avant-Garde Mom
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