Current Exhibit

From the shaded lawns of 19th-century Parisian parks to spontaneous spreads on city rooftops today, the picnic has long been a way for people to step outside the routines of daily life. It is a simple pleasure—a shared meal, a blanket on the grass—but it also reflects something more: a desire to slow down, to be together, and to enjoy the world in an unhurried way.

Within Jewish tradition, this spirit of gathering and gratitude is deeply rooted. From Shabbat meals enjoyed outdoors to Tu B’Shevat seders that celebrate the fruit of the trees, Jewish life holds space for honoring food, community, and creation. A picnic—shared in nature, unhurried and intentional—can mirror these values. It becomes not only an act of leisure but a moment of presence, reflection, and joy. The festival of Sukkot, for example, invites us to dwell outdoors, beneath a temporary shelter open to the sky. It is a time of hospitality, reflection, and celebration of the harvest—an ancient picnic, in many ways, where the sacred and the everyday meet under branches and stars. Whether in a sukkah or on a blanket in the park, the act of eating together outside becomes a moment of presence and connection.

The Art of Picnic explores this timeless tradition through painting, photography, sculpture, textiles, and design. Each piece reflects on the sensory, social, and symbolic layers of outdoor dining. Here, gingham becomes more than a pattern—it becomes memory. A basket is not just a container, but a carrier of culture. Blankets stretch out not only across grass but across time and geography, inviting us to consider what it means to share space, break bread, and simply be.
Whether curated or impromptu, the picnic embodies a yearning for simplicity—and yet, it is rich with meaning. In its quiet way, it asks us to reimagine consumption, intimacy, and place.

This exhibition invites you to unpack the ordinary and find art in the everyday—to sit, to taste, to observe.

To picnic.

Adee Ardon has worked with many mediums, but feels that oil pastels represent her best.
Her series, From the market, emphasizing color and layout, takes inspiration from the Israeli light and everyday life. Her subjects vary from her neighborhood in south Tel-Aviv to still life compositions and interiors. Ardon fills the paper with patterns and color blocks until there is no space left. She uses color combinations that complement one another to bring out the unexpected. Her naïve style emphasizes reality, and viewers may look twice at a still life or a portrait to think about a supposedly insignificant and mundane moment in time that is captured and re-created in the form of her work.

Jacqueline Kott-Wolle’s work Feels like home is based on her father’s resistance to any activities that required him to leave the beloved family home. “The House,” as referred to, was the embodiment of her dad’s survival (he was a child during the Shoah) and his success in Canada. It represented both victory and rootedness. Every detail was him—the wallpaper, the diamond marble floors, the objects, and the architecture. It was not a typical house like the ones her friends grew up in. They regularly drove to Montreal to visit grandparents and cousins, and her mother would prepare elaborate picnics that looked and felt like home. As they dined at a rest stop on Highway 401 East, Kott-Wolle thought this gesture was very reassuring for her dad.

The project Temporary Equality by Noa Klagsbald raises interesting questions about gender dynamics and the discourse of power and control. Through staged photography, Klagsbald not only documents the process but also participates in it, in a way that challenges the existing hierarchical structure. The fact that she places herself at the center, on a high referee chair, in a space dominated by men, raises the question of whether it is possible to change gender dynamics in situations that often seem unchangeable.

The choice of an industrial flour mill as the worksite, where the tennis court is being built, creates a fusion between traditionally male, physical, and labor-intensive work and the intention to shift the focus and introduce the female perspective. In this way, the project touches upon the question of “Will she succeed?” Can existing patterns be broken and true equality be achieved, or is it a temporary victory that fades as soon as the camera stops working?

The name of the project, Temporary Equality, emphasizes the idea of a moment of balance, where all players are at the same starting point, but it is clear that some form of resolution is necessary—the narrative cannot remain balanced indefinitely. The big question is what will happen when this equality is disrupted, and Klagsbald attempts to explore this question in the second part of the project, where she strives to gain “advantage”–-a term directly related to the struggle for success and taking control of the narrative.

Edith Fischer Katz’s work Human Nature refers to the human tendency to ignore anything that doesn’t serve its immediate desires. Inside a lampshade, designed for garden lighting, lies a miniature scene of remnants from an urban picnic. The picnic’s location, a patch of grass in the middle of a traffic island, acts as a seemingly sufficient representation of nature, highlighting the absurdity of the situation. The remnants of plastic waste, surrounded by a murky cloud of urban air pollution, serve as a reminder of the damage caused by human behavior, which tends to turn a blind eye. Among the leftovers, a cat and a pigeon wander, feeding on and suffering from the remnants left by humans, who are not physically present but have left their blatant mark.

The inspiration for the work Blue White Red came from the classic coloring of the picnic tablecloth—blue and white squares, also the colors of the Israeli flag. The visual connection caught Studio Yarnatak’s attention, and the two pieces of textile became the base for the piece. The flag is the most dominant symbol of the State of Israel, and its colors were chosen by the Zionist movement, using shades of light blue, blue, and white. For Israelis, these colors symbolize honesty, hope, purity, solemnity, and national pride.

A picnic is positive by any measure—time to rest, be in nature, eating and spending time together with family and friends, time to disconnect from everyday life. Red and white is another classic color combination for the picnic tablecloth. In the work, the red squares gradually take over all the squares of the tablecloth and become darker and deeper, and the white color disappears completely, and at the end, the distinction between the squares disappears, and the red becomes almost brown. In the work Blue White Red, Studio Yarnatak alleges that the Israeli flag and the picnic tablecloth have both been fatally damaged since October 7, 2023, symbolically. The values ​​and principles accompanying the flag were undermined, and sites that were peaceful and in nature will forever be memorialized as places of disaster.

Noam Zonshine’s Picnic series is inspired by old black and white photos of her grandparents and their friends from the Palmach (The underground army of the Jewish community) taken during the first years of the establishment of the state of Israel in the 1950s. The photos were taken during their trips and picnics, capturing the naïve atmosphere of the time. Noam Zonshine learned the traditional maiolica technique for painting on Portuguese Azulejo tiles from her mother. Through the combination of the traditional technique and the family photos, I connect my personal history in my own way. I grew up on the stories and heritage of the establishment of the state, while my family and I traveled representing it in different countries as part of my father’s work for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The Portuguese Azulejos have an ancient history, and were used, among other things, to describe the lives of rural life in Portugal in the 18th century. In my works, I wanted to perpetuate the history of my family and of the country, to capture the moment as it was, in the same way.

The video piece Mystical Thread by Ella Uzan was created using MorphoBlend, a technique developed specifically for this work, combining AI-generated genetic rendering with perceptual distortion to generate hybrid forms and fluid motion. The figures—part human, part alien, part forgotten dream—participate in a quiet ritual of eating that unfolds like an inherited memory. A mystical thread weaves through the piece, connecting distant species, emotional residue, and visual mythologies. The work investigates the space between identity and transformation, presence and absence, vision and sensation.

Suzy Kopf’s Jewish family has lived in San Francisco for 100 years. Made exclusively for this exhibition, this series of 5 hand-cut watercolor weavings draws on historical survey photography of the closest of the city’s 230 public parks to the family’s rented homes in the years during and immediately following WWII, a period of great population growth in San Francisco. The traversing of the family across the city’s neighborhoods closely mirrors the movement of the larger Jewish population of San Francisco from its origins in what is now the Mission to Pacific Heights to West Portal in a ten-year span.

In the shadow of the extreme events in Israel, Asaf Gam Hacohen developed this project inspired by Renoir’s famous work Luncheon of the Boating Party (le déjeuner des canotiers). The video Luncheon of the Displaced Persons depicts a tableau featuring members of the Israeli community that formed in the fishing village of Patnam in Goa, India. The tableau presents a satirical parody, in which a group of war refugees from various parts of Israel gather for a European-style feast, dressed in their finest attire as they attempt to mimic the composition of Renoir’s work. Despite their efforts to strike the appropriate poses, they struggle against the strong winds and intense background noises. Through this work, Gam Hacohen explores the concept of the “villa in the jungle” both within the Israeli context and in the colonialist context of India. He examines the various aspects derived from this concept, particularly concerning the relationship between culture and space, as well as notions of belonging and exclusion.

Reut Dafna’s works are based on photographs of her partner’s late grandfather from the early 1970s at picnics in Kibbutz Maoz Haim. These paintings are part of a large, complex, and endless project that deals with photos from the family album and the archives of the kibbutz. During Dafna’s search in the archives, she came across the photos of The Date Picnic, an event from the early 1970s held at the nearby date plantation. The painting is based on several photographs from different angles. Details are removed or added so the painting is not identical to the original. The Einy Family at a Picnic captures a quiet family moment during a community picnic.

Yelena Beliaev works with the image of the jar as a contemporary version of a storage vessel. The felt fruit inside the jar serves as an emotional trigger for a specific event, referring to a particular tradition, superstition, or cultural code, which is conveyed through the text on the jar. People of different nationalities, religions, and ages can become co-authors by sharing their memories.

Rotem Amitzur is a painter whose work begins by observing the world around her, and the paintings of the masters who came before her. These two forms of looking guide her process, which moves into a space where reality and imagination overlap, shift, and reshape one another. In recent years, collage has become central to her practice, offering a way to explore color and form simultaneously through cutting, assembling, and reconfiguring. Each painting distills a moment of recognition: when color and shape align into something that feels both precise and unexpected.

Available on Amsterdam Avenue and 76 Street from October 6–16.

This installation seeks to unravel the boundaries of the holiday table and invite the viewer into an experience of memory, identity, and hope. Instead of remaining horizontal, the table rises up to become the walls of the sukkah, which in turn transform into a festive canvas: a tablecloth woven from warp and weft.

Spread across this fabric is an unconventional holiday meal—nostalgic plates familiar from our grandmother’s house, adorned with decorations, each carrying a different layer of family history.

These plates are not meant for eating but for reflection. They become “mirror plates,” inviting the viewer to ask: Who are we? Who were we? Who do we aspire to be? How much have we changed along the way?

The installation is built like a scene from a play or film—an imaginary stage open to every passerby. It invites the audience to step into the sukkah, to pause for a moment, to slow down, and to allow themselves a moment of contemplation and intimacy.