Susan Chevlowe on ‘Missing Generations: Photographs by Jill Freedman’

Susan Chevlowe, Ph.D., will speak about the exhibition she organized at the Derfner Judaica Museum in Riverdale, New York, on view through July 16. The exhibition includes 36 black-and-white images by noted street photographer Jill Freedman (1939–2019), documenting sites of destruction and the resurgence of Jewish life after the Holocaust in Hungary, Poland, and the Czech Republic. Dating from 1993 to 1994, they feature survivors at commemorative events at Auschwitz-Birkenau and the Warsaw Ghetto Memorial in Poland, images from Terezín (Theresienstadt) in former Czechoslovakia, and the Jewish quarters in Prague and Kraków, as well as portraits of survivors in Florida and New York. Chevlowe will also discuss Freedman’s project in the context of work by other photographers in the decades after the Shoah who sought to represent the aftermath of this traumatic history in their images.

Jill Freedman gained acclaim for her photographs of Resurrection City—a six-week encampment organized by the Poor People’s Campaign on the Mall in Washington, D.C., that took place after Martin Luther King’s death in 1968. She is also known for the work she did when she embedded with New York City firefighters in the Bronx and in Harlem in the 1970s, and the NYPD from 1978 to 1981. Her work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, International Center of Photography, George Eastman House, Smithsonian American Art Museum, New York Public Library, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, and more.

About the Speaker
Susan Chevlowe is chief curator and museum director of Derfner Judaica Museum and the Art Collection at Hebrew Home at Riverdale, where she has organized numerous exhibitions since 2009, including the museum’s ongoing exhibition, “Tradition and Remembrance: Treasures of the Derfner Judaica Museum”, and solo exhibitions of Leonard Freed, Archie Rand, and Jill Nathanson, and many others. A former curator at the Jewish Museum in New York, she organized such exhibitions as “Painting a Place in America: Jewish Artists in New York” (with Norman L. Kleeblatt), “Common Man”, “Mythic Vision: The Paintings of Ben Shahn, 1936-1962”, and “The Jewish Identity Project: New American Photography.” She has also written or co-written accompanying catalog essays. An advisor to the Jewish Art Salon, she is the author and contributor to numerous books and exhibition catalogs on Jewish visual culture. Chevlowe received her Ph.D. in art history from the Graduate Center, CUNY.