That's Not Trash, That's John Waters's Art Collection

THE NEW YORK TIMES
Show Us Your Walls
By Melena Ryzik

John Waters in his New York apartment with “Candles, Chandelier, and Burning Chairs” (1993), by Karen Kilimnik

Mr. Waters, the filmmaker, author, performer, and bon vivant of bad taste. He has an expansive, and very seriously considered, art collection — even if a lot of it is funny, and some of it is, in his words, “ugly.” (He likes brown art, he said, for that very reason.) He began collecting as a teenager in suburban Baltimore, where his first pieces included an Andy Warhol print of Jackie Kennedy, purchased in 1964, for $100 — “which was a lot then,” he said. “A hundred dollars was like $1,000.” Since then, Mr. Waters, 73, has acquired several other (pricier) Warhols, and an insider’s knowledge of contemporary art; his own visual work has been exhibited in galleries and in a 2018 retrospective, “Indecent Exposure,” at the Baltimore Museum of Art. [More]

Judaism, in Color, in Italy

THE JERUSALEM POST
By Rossella Tercatin

THE COLORS of Judaism in Italy’ – in its splendor in Florence, in the Galleria degli Uffizi’s Aula Magliabechiana wing – is due to run until October 27.

During the spring of 1749 in Rome, a young Roman Jew, Anna Del Monte, was kidnapped by papal soldiers and locked up in the House of Catechumens, a Catholic institution aimed at converting Jews to Christianity. Anna, however, resisted the attempts to persuade her and after 13 days she was allowed to return to her family in the ghetto. A few years later, in celebration of Anna’s miraculous return, her father, Baruch Del Monte, donated to their synagogue a finely embroidered mappa, a rectangular piece of fabric designed to protect a Torah scroll. The showcase marks the first time in the four centuries of history of the iconic Uffizi that an exhibition is devoted to a Jewish topic, as Eike Schmidt, the director of the Uffizi, explained in a phone conversation with the Magazine. [More]

Works From The Benguiat Collection Coming to the Jewish Museum

BROADWAY WORLD

Deborah Kass, OY/YO, 2016, produced in 2017. Painted aluminum mounted on a polished stainless steel base. Purchase: Gift in honor of Norman Kleeblatt, Susan and Elihu Rose Chief Curator of the Jewish Museum from 2005-2017. 

The Jewish Museum will present Masterpieces and Curiosities: The Benguiat Collection from September 6, 2019, through July 2020, featuring over 30 works from the Museum's H. Ephraim and Mordecai Benguiat Family Collection. This collection of 300 examples of decorative and ceremonial art related to Jewish culture is one of the formative groups of the Jewish Museum's collection. The exhibition includes objects ranging from a newly restored Torah ark curtain from Istanbul (ca. 1735) to an ornately embroidered silk eighteenth-century pillowcase for the Passover Seder from Bulgaria.[More]