Our spring exhibition at The Cummer, ONE FAMILY: Photographs by Vardi Kahana, opens on Saturday, January 25th. Here is a sneak peak at the exhibition and installation process.
Vardi Kahana, Three Sisters, Tel Aviv, 1992, photograph. © Vardi Kahana, Courtesy of Andrea Meislin Gallery, New York.
In this exhibition, Vardi Kahana documents four generations of her family, beginning with her mother (Rivka, right) and two aunts (Leah, center and Esther, left), who were Auschwitz survivors. Through 31 black and white photographs, the exhibition provides a narrative to the Jewish-Israeli identity embodied in Vardi’s immediate and extended family.
One Family Installation, 2014, The Cummer Museum of Art & Gardens.
What is unique about this exhibition, is that we have the opportunity to work with the artist who created these photographs. Not only is Vardi working directly with the Curatorial team on exhibition layouts, wall locations, spacing of artwork, and text for the gallery; she will also be coming to Jacksonville to celebrate this exhibition with our members and donors at the opening festivities next week.
One Family Installation, 2014. The Cummer Museum of Art & Gardens. Courtesy of Brian Shrum.
The concept of “long-distance” curating of an exhibition, couldn’t be more accurate of a description for this show. Vardi currently lives in Tel Aviv, Israel, but has been very hands on in the installation process. She created a virtual layout of the exhibition using thumbnail images of her photographs. Once the photographs arrived at the museum, they were unpacked, condition reported, and placed in the gallery. From there, the install team took photographs (as you see throughout the blog) and sent them to Vardi so that she had a visual representation of her works in the gallery. Just this morning, we had a conference call with her to discuss some of the final details and tweaks needed before the show is actually hung on the walls.
One Family Installation, 2014. The Cummer Museum of Art & Gardens. Courtesy of Brian Shrum.
One Family Installation, 2014. The Cummer Museum of Art & Gardens. Courtesy of Brian Shrum.
The Museum’s One Family exhibition is the only scheduled show of Vardi’s work in the United States. For more information on the exhibition, please visit our website.
