When we think of the Jewish-American Diaspora, our minds don’t usually think of the South. It is the land of God — more specifically, that of Jesus Christ. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t thousands of Jews living in the area. Shoshana Gugenheim Kedem and Adam Carlin, co-directors of Greensboro Contemporary Jewish Museum in North Carolina, connect to this community through social practices.
The museum, which has no headquarters, began in 2019 when Gugenheim Kedem was invited to become artist-in-residence at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She worked in the small Jewish studies program, which brought her into contact with students in the religious studies department, none of whom were Jewish themselves.
Still, Gugenheim Kedem began meeting other Jews in the college town, which has about 3,000 residents – a small community compared to the millions spread across New York, Los Angeles, Miami and San Francisco – and decided that she wanted to launch a museum that celebrated this culture for its residency project.
“Jewish museums are settling in very large Jewish metropolises”, Kedem told me on Zoom. “They would never, under normal circumstances, establish a Jewish museum in Greensboro, North Carolina.”
With the maiden name of Gugenheim, but unrelated to THE Guggenheims, she has long been fascinated by museums and who wields their power, who gets to curate collections and whose voices are included. She connected with Carlin, who was then director of the UNCG Greensboro Project Space, and also a former classmate of hers at Portland State University’s MFA in Art and Social Practice, to launch the Greensboro Contemporary Jewish Museum and amplify Jewish stories in the predominantly Christian world. community.
For the first exhibition, 36 + 2, the museum posted a prompt: “Share a personal item infused with meaning to you as a Jew.” The items they received, from 36 participants and the two co-directors, included Judaica-style mezuzahs and menorahs, things traditionally associated with religion, but also more abstract items, like Tupperware and a football trading card. These objects were related to the Jewish experience in a more indirect, but equally significant way. Food, prepared by a Jewish community in Virginia, was brought to a breast cancer survivor as she healed; and the trading card was given to a shy new student in elementary school, and the owner thought the generosity represented tikkun olama tenant who asks the Jews to fix and improve the world.
After the exhibition ended, the GCJM opted to decentralize the museum, with residents acting as guardians of the permanent collection. In this way, no one had to permanently part with sentimental objects. Gugenheim Kedem made stickers that participants could publicly display in their windows, signifying their involvement in the GCJM. These decals seemed risky in a town where every other house has a sign praising Jesus on their lawn. Although no one suffered an anti-Semitic backlash, publicly announcing one’s identity felt like a risk.
“I think the intentions of the spaces we create and the communities we create are in response to not feeling safe all the time,” Carlin said. “Using social practice to engage the Jewish community is a tool to combat these things. It is anchored in our projects, and doing it in the South is particularly important.
The fact that 36 people joined the first exhibition was fortuitous – the number corresponds to the Hebrew letter “Chai”, which is also represented by the number 18. All divisions of 18 are considered lucky in Jewish culture. It was a sign for the museum project to continue functioning beyond Gugenheim Kedem’s residence.
The pandemic moved the GCJM online, but they continued to hold virtual events like a sweeping seder for Passover and a kosher cooking lesson for Shavuot, a spring harvest festival. When Greensboro reopened, they built a Sukkah at the Elsewhere Museum, an artist-run space that, coincidentally, was run by another Jewish person. The community grew.
GCJM and Elsewhere have partnered to conduct their next big project, a 10-day social practice institute for Southern Jewish artists. The inaugural cohort brought in four artists from North Carolina, Arkansas, Washington, DC, and Florida, who filled their days with lectures, workshops, fieldwork, and art production. Artists have taken this training back to their communities.
Although their projects are still in development, we have a glimpse of what lies ahead thanks to the collaborative performance of Zoe Wampler Divrei Torah Time Machine (2023-ongoing). Wampler, a movement artist, producer, and educator, invites people to revisit the Torah portion of their bar or bat mitzvah by asking them questions that get them thinking about their coming-of-age journey.
Gugenheim Kedem and Carlin generated a lot of interest in this residency from people outside the South – including myself, as I’m also a social practice artist in addition to a writer – but strictly kept attendees regional.
The Social Practice Institute will soon complete its first year of engagement and is preparing to publish a call for its second cohort. Additionally, the GCJM is planning public programming around a new public sculpture, “This Woman Wouldn’t Take Off Her Boots,” (2023) North Carolina’s first monument to the women and children of the Holocaust, which has was unveiled in April. The artist, Victoria Carlin Milstein, incorporated bronze casts of Greensboro resident and Holocaust survivor Shelly Weiner into the sculpture.
Even with these programs, the future of the GCJM is precarious. Without a permanent space, they depend on partnerships with places like the Elsewhere Museum to make their presence known in Greensboro. They’re also battling for funding in a city that’s consistently overlooked for big cities.
“I think the cultural impact of the Jewish community in the South [artist] The community is not showcased in the same way as artists in Brooklyn, LA or San Francisco,” Gugenheim Kedem said.
The GCJM could be used as a model to shed light on other areas where Jewish populations are present, but their histories are unknown. Imagine a Jewish museum in rural Oklahoma, Nebraska or Utah. Greensboro may shine a light on Jewish arts and culture in the South, but we are, in fact, everywhere.
