Published by Roberts & Tilton, Culver City, California
Text by Dr. Shalva Weil, Ruth Eglash and Claudia J. Nahson
Kehinde Wiley’s acclaimed World Stage series inserts into the language of old master portraiture the very ethnicities and ethnic iconography that western art has most excluded from it, or that western art has portrayed solely in colonial, Orientalist terms. Among the countries and continents he has previously depicted in this ambitious traveling epic are Brazil, Africa, China, India and Sri Lanka. The rhetoric of Wiley’s paintings is powerful in its compositional candor, color palette and playfulness with constructions of visual meaning; as Paul D. Miller (DJ Spooky) notes, “Wiley’s canvas surfaces are a mirror reflection of America’s unceasing search for new meanings from the ruins of the Old World of Europe and Africa.” This volume includes a selection of new World Stage portraits, focusing on contemporary youth from Jewish-Ethiopian-Israeli, Jewish-Israeli and Arab-Israeli communities. The World Stage: Israel was exhibited at Roberts & Tilton April 9 - May 28, 2011 and will be shown at The Jewish Museum, New York, March 9 - July 29, 2012.
About the Essayists: Ruth Eglash is a senior correspondent for The Jerusalem Post, Israel. Her articles focus on a wide range of topics, including the social-welfare struggles of Israel’s citizens and ethnic minorities, as well as the challenges of its populations. Eglash was the first co-recipient of the United Nations Alliance of Civilization and the International Center for Journalists X-Cultural Reporting Award for her cross-border reporting about the dismal state of relations between Israel and Jordan 16 years after peace was signed. Claudia J. Nahson is a curator at The Jewish Museum, New York. She is the author of The Snowy Day and the Art of Ezra Jack Keats (2011), The Art of William Steig (2007), and Ketubbot: Marriage Contracts from The Jewish Museum (1998) and a contributor to Masterworks of The Jewish Museum (2004). She oversaw the reinstallation of part of the museum’s permanent exhibition, Culture and Continuity: The Jewish Journey (2003), and curated Wild Things: The Art of Maurice Sendak (2005) and Curious George: The Art of Margret and H. A. Rey (2010). Shalva Weil, Ph.D. is a senior research at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. She is the President of Sosteje (Society for the Study of Ethiopian Jewry) and an Honorary Member of the International Society for the Study of African Jewry.
Format: Hardcover, 11.5 x 8.75 inches/29 x 22 cm
English/Hebrew, 64 pages, 40 color images
ISBN: 978-1-4276-1375-2
