When we think of the Jewish-American diaspora, our mind usually doesn’t think of the South. That is God’s country — more specifically, Jesus Christ’s. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t thousands of Jews living in the region. Shoshana Gugenheim Kedem and Adam Carlin, co-directors of the Greensboro Contemporary Jewish Museum in North Carolina, are connecting with this community through social practice.
The museum, which doesn’t have a brick-and-mortar headquarters, began in 2019 when Gugenheim Kedem was invited to become an artist in residence at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. She worked within the small Jewish Studies Program, which connected her with students in the religious studies department, none of whom were Jewish themselves.
Still, Gugenheim Kedem started meeting other Jews in the college town, which boasts a population of about 3,000 — a tiny community compared to the millions spread across New York City, Los Angeles, Miami, and San Francisco — and decided that she wanted to launch a museum that celebrated this culture for her residency project.
“Jewish museums get established in very large, Jewish metropolises,” Kedem told me over Zoom. “They would never, under normal circumstances, establish a Jewish museum in Greensboro, North Carolina.”
With the maiden name of Gugenheim, but no relationship to the Guggenheims, she has long been fascinated with museums and who holds their power, who gets to curate collections, and whose voices are included. She connected with Carlin, who was then the 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 community.
For the first exhibition, 36 + 2, the museum disseminated a prompt out in the community: “Please share a personal object that is imbued with significance to you as a Jew.” The items they received included Judaica-like mezuzahs and menorahs, things traditionally associated with the religion, but also more abstractly-related items, like Tupperware and a football trading card. These objects related to the Jewish experience in more indirect, but equally significant ways. Food, prepared by a Jewish community in Virginia, was carried to a breast cancer survivor while she healed; and the trading card was given to a shy new student in elementary school, and the owner thought the generosity represented tikkun olam, a tenant that asks Jews to repair and improve the world.
After the exhibition ended, GCJM chose to make the museum decentralized, with residents doubling as the stewards of the permanent collection. This way, no one had to permanently part with sentimental items. Gugenheim Kedem made stickers that the participants could publicly display in their windows, signifying their involvement in the GCJM. Those decals felt risky in a town where every other home has a sign praising Jesus on their front lawn. Though no one experienced any anti-Semitic backlash, publicly announcing their identity felt like a risk.
“I think the intentions of the spaces we’re creating and the communities that we’re creating is in response to not feeling safe all the time,” Carlin said. “Using social practice to engage the Jewish community is a tool to fight those things. It’s ingrained 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 seen as lucky in Jewish culture. It was a sign to keep the museum project running past Gugenheim Kedem’s residency.
The pandemic moved GCJM online, but they continued to host virtual events like a radical seder for Passover and a Kosher baking lesson for Shavuot, a Spring harvest festival. When Greensboro reopened, they built a Sukkah at the Elsewhere Museum. The community was expanding.
GCJM and Elsewhere teamed up to run their next big project, a 10-day Social Practice Institute for Jewish artists across the South. 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. The artists took this training back into their communities.
Though their projects are still in development, we get a glimpse of what’s to come through Zoe Wampler’s collaborative performance Divrei Torah Time Machine (2023–ongoing). Wampler, a movement artist, producer, and educator, invites people to revisit the Torah portion from their bar or bat mitzvah by prompting them with questions that get them to reflect on their coming-of-age journey.
Gugenheim Kedem and Carlin received a lot of interest in this residency from people outside of the South — including myself, as I am also a social practice artist in addition to a writer — but strictly kept the participants regional.
The Social Practice Institute will soon wrap its first year of engagement and is preparing to post a call for its second cohort. In addition, the GCJM is planning public programming around a new public sculpture, “She Wouldn’t Take Off Her Boots,” (2023), which 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’re dependent on partnerships with places like the Elsewhere Museum to keep their presence known in Greensboro. They’re also fighting for funding in a town that’s constantly passed over for larger cities.
“I think that the cultural impact of the Southern Jewish [artist] community is not highlighted in the same way as artists from Brooklyn, LA, or San Francisco,” Gugenheim Kedem said.
The GCJM could be used as a template to spotlight other regions where Jewish populations are present, but their stories are unknown. Imagine a Jewish museum in rural Oklahoma, Nebraska, or Utah. Greensboro may be shedding a light on Jewish arts and culture in the South, but we are, in fact, everywhere.
