May is Jewish-American Heritage Month, and a new exhibition called 48 Jews: Layers of Identity is on display at the Jewish Museum of Milwaukee. It features portraits of some prominent figures from the Jewish diaspora, from Marc Chagall to Gertrude Stein. The portraits celebrate people’s contributions, challenge assumptions, and raise questions. You can also step into the stories of the portrait subjects with biographies available online. WUWM spoke with artist Jac Lahav about the exhibition.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Maayan Silver: How did you come up with the idea for the exhibition?
Jac Lahav: The whole series started from my search for Jewish identity and trying to understand who do we see as famous Jews, but who do I even know as important figures in Jewish community. And as I started to research, I was looking around and found, of course, some of the big names like Anne Frank, Elie Wiesel, Ruth Bader Ginsburg. But then I started to discover interesting things, like Elvis Presley has four generations of maternal Jewish descent. And in Jewish faith, that might make somebody Jewish, but Elvis wasn't Jewish. So what does that mean? And how do we tweeze out some of these blurry lines between identity, personal identity, group identity, things like that.
How would you describe your portrait style? Some are in color, some are black and white. Some have really vibrant backgrounds. Some have abstract patterns.
Yeah, some people called this, what I was doing is "style flipping." And all of the works are a little bit different. I mean, I also have a little bit of an ADHD mind, so I get bored easily. And if I do one thing hyperrealist, then I want to do something abstract. And even though those aspects speak to the person often, they're also an idea of identity in general that we all have different identities, even though we're a group. So even then, this is another layer, a conceptual layer where all of these people are individuals, but they're all painted in different ways as well.
You've got Albert Einstein, Gene Wilder, Shel Silverstein, Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Do you have a Jewish figure who was your favorite to paint?
In this series, there's the 48 Jews, but then we also decided to hang this other series of Anne Franks. And I've done a whole bunch of Anne Franks, but we selected 18, which is a lucky number in the Jewish faith. And so there are 18 images of Anne Frank, sort of trying to ask how far from the original can we get before it's still an image of Anne Frank and asking questions of art and editing. Like, her original manuscript was edited after she wrote it. So, I found that was really engaging. I've also, for this particular show, we painted a group of people that are from Milwaukee, like Gene Wilder and Golda Meir. So, there were about six portraits of people from Milwaukee, and I really enjoyed diving into some of those local histories.
Was there anyone that you included in the exhibit who you weren't familiar with before? I'm guessing some of those Milwaukee people.
Yeah, I mean, Helen Bader Daniels was a big philanthropist and they host the Helen Bader Daniels Day every year. And so that was an interesting figure. Emma Lazarus, I knew of Emma Lazarus, but I didn't realize that she was Jewish. And so, digging into that history was also really interesting. She is not from Milwaukee, but also a historical figure.
And she wrote the famous words on the Statue of Liberty in 1903: ‘Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.’ So that's pretty iconic on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty.
Super iconic and super relevant to today as well, right? With all of our issues with immigration and who, this series is asking who is Jewish, but it's also, it's for everybody and asking what are our identities and how can we be inclusive and how can we bond ourselves together? More than separating ourselves, I think that's a really important takeaway.
