Exhibition Spotlight: "I’ll Have What She’s Having”: The Jewish Deli

Learning through food histories is a fascinating & compelling way to explore the past and learn about peoples, regions, and cultures. For instance, a few years ago I wrote a 60 minute food histories of DC program for a client and through this strictly food-based research, I learned so much more about the District of Columbia itself. A new exhibition at the Capital Jewish Museum titled "I’ll Have What She’s Having”: The Jewish Deli encapsulates all of that same sentiment and more.

From exploring the effects of 20th century immigration, to defining the actual foods served in delis, to surprisingly relevant modern day pop culture movie references, this exhibition is more than just a food history. It showcases how American Jews, through delis, created new American food traditions, ensured continuity of important established traditions, and practiced a time-tested, cross cultural social exercise — sitting down together to have a meal.

Of course, since this is the Capital Jewish Museum —as in Washington, DC— there is a solid emphasis on the DC area history in deli culture from present day and years past. That includes the suburbs of Washington, too. Not to mention the existing interactive computer display of delis and other Jewish owned business, schools, places of worship, and significant sites in the ongoing exhibition (Connect. Reflect. Act.).

I loved the mix of laying groundwork through immigration histories while showing present day ephemera that makes every individual deli that particular deli — uniforms, menus, equipment, signage, and advertisements. We have all seen these places in everyday city life, but the context and meaning make seeing the exhibition more of a journey. And of course, if you explore it all from beginning to end, you'll get to watch the namesake, payoff “I’ll have what she’s having” film scene in the final gallery. Admittedly a somewhat hilarious sounding clip if you haven't seen the movie and you hear it while making your way through the adjacent room in the exhibition.

“I’ll Have What She’s Having”: The Jewish Deli” is on view through August 20, 2024. As a special exhibition, it does require an entrance ticket of $15. The rest of the museum is free with timed ticket. Walk-ins are excepted as space permits. 575 3rd St NW.

Exhibition Spotlight: Brilliant Exiles

Josephine Baker est aux Folies-Bergère. Lithograph, 1936. ByMichel Gyarmathy (1908-1996).

Happy belated birthday Josephine Baker! The singer, dancer, and actor who captivated Paris in the 1920s was born 118 years ago this week, on June 3, 1906.

Baker was but one of many innovative and creative American women who moved to Paris in the early 20th century seeking personal autonomy along with professional agency and success.

Some of these “brilliant exiles” are profiled in the new National Portrait Gallery exhibition by the same name, “Brilliant Exiles: American Women in Paris, 1900-1939.” The exhibition is open through February 23, 2025.

Loïs Mailou Jones 1905-1998. Charcoal and chalk on textured paper, c. 1940. By Céline Tabary (1908-1993) .

Gertrude Stein 1874-1946. Oil on canvas, 1905-6. By Pablo Picasso (1881-1973).

The show is made up of nearly 80 works of art, mostly in the form of portraits. The portraits are of, and sometimes also by these Americans who shifted and elevated the Paris culture through literature, visual, arts, dance, drama, and philosophy.

Portraiture has a way of annunciating identity in a more evocative way than even the written word can. This exhibition does that in a simple way, letting the paintings speak for themselves.

Baker, like the other American women featured in the exhibition, did not leave the U.S. and land in Paris by accident or coincidence. Crushing legal and social limitations in the U.S. left little room for freedom expression for independent and talented women. Restrictions were based not on just gender, but sexuality, race, economic stratifications, and politics. Paris was not a panacea for all U.S. societal ills, but the artistic climate offered more independence, agency, and freedom to an extent that, for these women, the U.S. could not compare.

Mercedes de Acosta 1893-1968. Oil on canvas, 1923. By Abram Poole (1882-1961).

Baker herself moved to Paris in 1925. She did return to the U.S. for short stints in theatrical productions, and more extensively to lend her aid to the cresting civil rights movements in the 1960s. But by then she was a Parisian through and through, having gained French citizenship way back in 1937. Baker died in Paris, passing away in her sleep on April 12, 1975, just days after performing in a show marking her 50th year of her Paris debut.

This exhibitions is about more than Baker herself. The portraits that make up the show give a luminescent view into the personality, and dare I say, aura, of the people captured. This is high recommend to visit before the show closes in February of 2025!

This and all Exhibition Spotlights are brought to you by our wonderful Patrons. Patrons get monthly insight into new and upcoming museum exhibitions, DC history posts, photographs not shown anywhere else, and more. If you like this post, there’s way more at Patreon.com/AttucksAdams! Memberships start at just $3/month.

In Exaltation of Flowers: Rose- Geranium; Petunia-Caladium-Budleya; and Golden-Banded Lily-Violets. Katharine Nash Rhoades 1885-1965. Marion H. Beckett 1886-1949. Mercedes de Cordoba Carles 1879-1963. Tempera and gold leaf on canvas, 1910-13. By Edward Steichen(1879-1973).

New Works at the Gallery: Bisa Butler

This week I will be sharing some of my favorite new pieces on display at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and National Portrait Gallery.

Up second is "Patternmaster" by Bisa Butler.

Octavia Butler is one of my favorite authors – but I’m not alone. She was a groundbreaking science fiction author and multiple award winning literary giant whose work perhaps has resonated more even after her passing in 2006.

Butler is known for complex world building while incorporating themes such as racial injustice, gender inequality, environmental degradation, genetic engineering, and human (and sometimes alien) evolution.

In that same world building vein, Bisa Butler (no relation) has used various materials to build this stunning portrait of Octavia Butler. The artist used cotton, silk, vinyl, lace, beads, rhinestones, and other materials that all come together to make a quilt. The quilt is the portrait. Bisa Butler’s layering of fabric and materials mimic the layering of human emotion, speculative fiction, and fantastical scenarios that make Octavia Butler's writing so engaging. Talk about the portrait matching the person. This is it.

Check out yesterday’s post on Roger Brown and stay tuned for the final post tomorrow.✌🏾

Exhibition Spotlight: Afro-Atlantic Histories

Afro-Atlantic Histories is both 1) an historical exhibition about the African diaspora *and* 2) an array of depictions of the African diaspora in art, past and present. Expectedly, it's more the latter, but art can inspire us to learn more, and also inform us in the meantime.

Hosted at the National Gallery of Art (NGA), this exhibition feels extremely worldly, perhaps more than any other recent exhibition there. Originally this show debuted in 2018 at Brazil's Museu de Arte de São Paulo.

This show has over 130 artworks and objects from the 17th century to today. Media from paintings, to metal & wood sculptures, to photographs, to video are all present, and more. The entire show comprises about six galleries, which is substantial for NGA. It is worth a trip.

Afro-Atlantic Histories is open through July 17, 2022.

For the full write up and entire photo set, please consider joining Patreon. I post there weekly and subscriptions start at just $3 per month!

Exhibition Preview: The Wall/El Muro

The National Building Museum is open Friday-Monday 11am-4pm. 401 F Street NW.

What is a border? I often think about borders living here in the District of Columbia. Since Virginia, Maryland, and the District comprise a dense and diverse metropolitan area, much attention is paid to borders, what living on one side or the other means for your life, and what those borders say about us depending on where we live and work relative to them. Even within DC itself, political borders like Wards and Quadrants are significant markers of identity and policy. 

The Wall/El Muro: What is a Border Wall? exhibition at the National Building Museum is both a swift historical dive into the U.S.-Mexico border as part of our built world, as well as an introduction to understanding the impact of the infrastructure itself. This show is presented in English and Spanish.

The exhibition takes a wide view at the outset, helping visitors define what a border actually is and displaying a fascinating map (c. 1728) of Spanish North America denoting the borders of American Indian tribes before the British, French, Spanish, and others divided up the continent, eventually morphing into the national borders we have today. Of course national borders are not new, and not exclusive to North America, a fact smartly acknowledged here in the first bay, visualizing border walls and barriers across the globe. 

Border wall prototypes c. 2019.

From there the focus is in the U.S.-Mexico border, and not just the physical manifestation of the border wall. The exhibition has a running timeline from the late 1700s to present day on border policy, popular fears around immigrants and immigration, and national immigration policy itself. 

There is a good division among storytelling about the history of the border wall, examination of the physical infrastructure of the many types of walls & barriers, and the impact of the existence of borders including on the people who cross or attempt to cross, the mechanisms around how we ask people to access borders, and the results of the often dangerous and violent process of interacting with the border.

Migrant belongings left behind in the Sonoran Desert.

Complementing the maps, timelines, and infographics are several extraordinary objects.

One ordinary chain link fence with barbed wire atop stood out even before I entered the exhibition because I could see it from the Museum's Great Hall, which has windows into the show. This small section of fence was used by U.S. authorities in 1950 as part of a border wall between Mexico and the U.S. state of California. It was installed in 1950. This fencing had been used before, though. During World War II, it separated internees from the outside world as they were detained in the Crystal City Alien Enemy Detention Facility in Texas. A fence serving two borders, within a different time, space, and affect.

Another was the bright pink teeter-totter, a universal children's play thing and simple machine, but also a protest. The teeter-totter brought children together through the border fence, with each half of the lever on the opposite of the border wall between Mexico and the United States. A short accompanying video shed light on the artists and the installation which was located near El Paso, Texas.

I walked away still thinking about the essence of what it means to have national borders, state borders, even local neighborhood borders. So many questions are still on the table after seeing this exhibition: Do borders necessarily beget violence? Who decides where borders are located? In which other forms, besides lines on a map or fences in the ground do we enforce borders? What would a borderless world look like? And so many others. In this way, I consider the exhibition a success.

The Wall/El Muro opens on Saturday November 6, 2021 and closes one year later on November 6, 2022. It;s located on the first floor of the National Building Museum at 401 F Street NW in downtown Washington, DC. The Museum is currently open Friday-Monday 11am-4pm. Tickets to the museum cost $10 for adults. OYu can still enter and view the Great Hall for free, which I highly recommend!

The Museum’s Great Hall is open to the public whenever the museum is open.

This exhibition preview was made possible by montly supporters on Patreon. Thanks to you all! Get weekly history posts, photos of DC’s most interesting places, and as more museums reopen, exhibition previews and reviews. Check it out—> Patreon: Attucks Adams.