Nicki Green's Firmament at the Contemporary Jewish Museum

 A little bit of bragging is in order. 

My cousin Nicki Green has her first solo exhibition of her work at a major museum.  It opened last week at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco.  The show is called Firmament, and is on through Feb 2, 2025.

From left: Nicki Green, Drifting Upon Swollen Water (Gavriel), A Slack Unthreading (Raphael), Perforated in the Night (Uriel), Fruitful Vine 2 (Michael), 2024. Courtesy the artist and CULT Aimee Friberg.
 

 She also has another related exhibition Eye of the Fountain at gallery CULT Aimee 

 Friberg that runs through November 16 also in San Francisco

 

 Her work is ceramic based, and celebrates and explores liminality and the interplay between Judaism, trans identity, and transformation.  The press release says it a lot better than I can:

This September, The Contemporary Jewish Museum (The CJM) will present Nicki Green: Firmament, the transdisciplinary artist’s first solo museum exhibition. In this presentation, Green explores identity, transformation, and Jewish tradition through artworks that invoke imagery of fermentation, Jewish ritual, mycelium, and more. Bringing together new and existing works, the exhibition will include large-scale sculptures, fiber works, ritual objects, and drawings. The exhibition will be on view September 5, 2024 through February 2, 2025.

Green’s inspiration for this exhibition comes from the concept of the firmament — a thin dome or expanse referenced in the Book of Genesis that divides the earth from the heavens. This form of separation in the Torah offers Green a reference to imagine an architectural object that functions as a sanctuary for in-between states of being and thinking, and an environment of warmth, welcome, and liberation for trans and nonbinary bodies.

The central sculpture appears as a large tent-like structure situated in the center of the gallery and frames several of the large-scale clay works on view. In addition to the firmament, the structure is inspired by descriptions of the biblical mishkan or tabernacle — a portable sanctuary constructed by the Jewish people to represent God’s earthly domain while in exile. The “skin” of the tent — a sculpture made by Green’s longtime collaborator, artist Ricki Dwyer — is woven to reach up to the heavens, while also anchoring and sheltering the artworks and bodies in the space.  READ THE REST OF THE PRESS RELEASE

A couple of years ago I went to the Lyons Bienniale because she had some work featured in it, I spent a couple of days roaming the Bienniale, hanging out with her and her husband and her friends (including Ricki Dwyer, who collaborated on the main sculpture for this exhibit, and basically enjoying Lyons.  Eye of the Fountain was featured in the Lyons exhibit.









And my family went and visited her in Wisconsin on a very snowy day when she was in residence at the Kohler factory.  

Eye of the Fountain. This appeared at the Lyons Bienniale

Nicki and I when we visited together at the Kohler 

Nicki's a really talented artist who puts a lot of meaning and thought into her work.  I am so proud of her for slugging it out in the competitive art world, doing what she loves, and yes, making it happen. I know how hard it is to stick your guns as an artist.

If you are in the Bay Area, please go check out her exhibits and let me know how you liked them!

For more information about the exhibition, and ticket prices, visit the Contemporary Jewish Museum's website:  https://www.thecjm.org/exhibitions/236. And you can read the text of her exhibition here: https://tinyurl.com/nickigreenfirmamenttext

Information about her exhibit at Cult Aimee Friberg is here:
https://cultexhibitions.com/exhibition/eye-of-the-fountain/

You can also read these reviews of her exhibition here:
 SF Gate article https://tinyurl.com/nickigreensfgat2024

 Kqed review https://tinyurl.com/nickigreenkqed2024
Hey Alma: https://tinyurl.com/nickigreen-heyalma

The Inventor of Handwashing Died of a Flesh Wound

The Google Doodle of the Day on Saturday was a fascinating rabbit hole.  It features Ignaz Semmelweis, who was one of the first proponents of handwashing.

As an Austrian doctor and obstetrician during the mid 1800s, he noted that one clinic in the Vienna general hospital had a much lower rate of childbirth than the other.  He noted that in one maternity clinic the practitioners also dealt with the morgue, and the other one they didn't.  He did a series of experiments, trying to discover what the difference was to make the mortality rate so high in one clinic and not the other.  Through a process of elimination, he imagined that there were minuscule cadaverous materials that the doctors were bringing with them from the morgue, and was convinced that was the problem.  As an experiment, he asked them to clean their hands using a solution of chlorinated lime (because this was good at erasing the smell of corpses.)  The mortality rate went from 10-15% in that ward month to month down to 1-2%, and even a couple of months there were no mortalities.





Despite this evidence and more, the medical community scorned his ideas.  He had 20 years of rejection and people laughing at him.  He lost his post in Vienna, moved to Budapest and took to writing incendiary letters to his detractors and to obstetricians, calling them murderers.  In the end, his wife and his friends committed him to an asylum, where he died two weeks later of-- oh the irony- gangrene from an infected wound.

This chart courtesy of the Wikipedia article on Semmelweis.

The esteemed scientists who laughed at him believed in the idea of four humours-- that diseases were individual, and that the best way to right a person was by bloodletting.  20 years after his death, Louis Pasteur's theory of germs became widely accepted and would have been supported by the work of Semmelweis.

Semmelweis's struggle has been captured in plays, films, and operas. In fact, a 1938 film about him won the Best Short Film Oscar (One Reel) of 1939.  That Mothers Might Live. (video below)

Also, Semmelweis's plight has been immortalized in a psychological term known as the Semmelweis Reflex, which is the often reflexive tendency to reject new ideas or evidence because it contradicts established norms or beliefs.

And this could still happen today.  That's why it's so important to have an open mind and be willing to be persuaded by new evidence or knowledge.   (I'm looking at you #trumpsupporters)






Enjoy this movie-- I found it on Youtube, and its' pretty powerful.

Thumbnail biography of Ignaz Semmelweis (courtesy of Wikipedia)

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Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis (1 July 1818 – 13 August 1865) was an Austrian-Hungarian physician and scientist, now known as an early pioneer of antiseptic procedures. Described as the "saviour of mothers", Semmelweis discovered that the incidence of puerperal fever (also known as "childbed fever") could be drastically cut by the use of hand disinfection in obstetrical clinics. Puerperal fever was common in mid-19th-century hospitals and often fatal. Semmelweis proposed the practice of washing hands with chlorinated lime solutions in 1847 while working in Vienna General Hospital's First Obstetrical Clinic, where doctors' wards had three times the mortality of midwives' wards. He published a book of his findings in Etiology, Concept and Prophylaxis of Childbed Fever. 

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Despite various publications of results where hand washing reduced mortality to below 1%, Semmelweis's observations conflicted with the established scientific and medical opinions of the time and his ideas were rejected by the medical community. Semmelweis could offer no acceptable scientific explanation for his findings, and some doctors were offended at the suggestion that they should wash their hands and mocked him for it. In 1865, the increasingly outspoken Semmelweis supposedly suffered a nervous breakdown and was committed to an asylum by his colleagues. He died 14 days later, at the age of 47, from a gangrenous wound on his right hand which might have been caused by a beating from the guards. Semmelweis's practice earned widespread acceptance only years after his death, when Louis Pasteur confirmed the germ theory, and Joseph Lister, acting on the French microbiologist's research, practised and operated using hygienic methods, with great success.

Running a School Like Walt Disney World!

I got alerted via google to a new post recently on EDSURGE, which details information about a principal from a Virginia elementary school
(Lynn Colón of MARY WILLIAMS ELEMENTARY) who is using the principles of Walt Disney World to run her school.  

While education and entertainment don't normally mix in a school setting, they are doing their part to make their school a Happier place.

 Maybe not the Happiest Place on Earth (that sobriquet is already taken)

As detailed in the article, those principles include

• CUSTOMER FOCUS:  Making sure that all of the programs (and all of the employees/teachers) are serving the kids.   

• APPROPRIATE TECHNOLOGY: Using technology as a tool to make education fun. They also use technology to communicate more effectively with students, parents, and teachers. 

• SECOND CHANCES:  They don't expel kids or exclude them from activities. They host extra activities like lunches, book clubs, and feedback sessions to allow the kids to have a say in what's working and what isn't. 

• STAKE HOLDER FEEDBACK:  During teacher training, teachers lead what needs to be taught to them. Parents are given transparent data about how students are doing, and give feedback on how the school is run. 

Most of these sound like good ideas, but it would be easy to pay them lip service without actually doing them. 

 But apparently, doing them makes a big difference. The principal was
was recently recognized as a National School Board Association's "20 to Watch."  And the school has won a "School of Excellence Award" from their county.

What do you think?  Would your school benefit from adding these ideas into the mix?

The full article is here: https://www.edsurge.com/news/2017-04-26-your-guide-to-running-a-school-like-disney-world
article: