Dwelling Art

Dwelling in a Time of Plagues

CAJM is proud to announce that the CANVAS Jewish arts and culture funding collaborative has mobilized Jewish museums, artists, authors, and networks, to produce a new season of Dwelling in a Time of Plagues in time for Pesach. This national project is a Jewish creative response to the real-world plagues of our time, drawing on talents across the ecosystem of Jewish arts and culture.

Several organizations in CAJM’s membership are displaying new works onsite or online, including the Jewish Museum of Maryland, the Vilna Shul, the Contemporary Jewish Museum, the Jewish Arts Collaborative, and the Jewish Museum of Florida. 

These new works — outdoor sculptures, murals, essays, audio pieces, videos, and digital art experiences — reinterpret the themes of Passover in response to our times. Collectively, they grapple with contemporary plagues, such as the global pandemic, homelessness, institutional racism, xenophobia, ageism, forced isolation, binary thinking, and the climate crisis. Each work is accompanied by a literary response to that plague, based on conversations between the artists and Jewish authors. The works are all shown online at www.plaguedwelling.com, and will also be featured in a downloadable PDF designed to spark conversations at seder tables, in your communities, and beyond.  For more information, contact executive@cajm.net.

“Dwelling” is a collaboration of Jewish arts and culture networks Reboot, Asylum Arts, LABA, the Council of American Jewish Museums, and the Jewish Book Council. The five are grantees of CANVAS, a Jewish Funders Network-incubated philanthropic collaborative dedicated to elevating the field of Jewish arts and culture.