Three Millennia of Jewish Art & Architecture with Ori Z. Soltes

Tradition and Transformation: Ori is back for a series of two lectures!

Georgetown University art historian Ori Soltes will walk us through 3,000 years of Jewish art and architecture based on his book Tradition and Transformation: Three Millennia of Jewish Art & Architecture. A project three decades in the making, the volume presents a staggeringly complete investigation of what it means to define a work of art as “Jewish art”. Soltes examines the impact of identity, faith, and aesthetics on a wide range of creators, particularly in the modern and contemporary eras.

The first talk will look at a beautiful array of objects, from ancient synagogue wall-paintings and mosaic floors to lush, gilded medieval illuminated manuscripts and intricately-shaped spice boxes to nineteenth-century genre paintings by Mauritzy Gottlieb (the “Jewish Rembrandt”) and Pissarro’s delicately-colored impressionist paintings–observing how across the millennia the very criteria of what defines “Jewish art” shifts.

Tradition and Transformation cont’d: June 27 @ 4pm