By David Prince, Israel Consulate General, New York

This Land To Me: Some Call It Palestine, Others Israel - Barbara Grover
Sep. 15-Dec. 15
Opening Reception: Sep. 15, 6 pm
Photojournalist Barbara Grover has traveled throughout the land to interview and photograph people for this project. Life-size photographs and first-person narratives in text and audio format offer an alternative approach to the most important global issue of our times, using visual art as an educational medium to effect and transform social and political consciousness. The photos and narratives, printed on large canvas panels side by side with the texts, represent Israelis and Palestinians from all walks of life and perspectives. Their stories answer the question of what the land means to them in candid, intimate terms. The Museum will host lectures, films, and open forums led by national figures of Israeli and Palestinian security, diplomacy, public policy, and religion, engaging individuals throughout Queens and metropolitan NY.
The Godwin-Ternbach Museum in Queens College, 65-30 Kissena Blvd, Flushing NY. For more information please call: (718) 997-4747 or visit: www.qc.cuny.edu/godwin
 

The Forgotten Photographs: The Work of Paul Goldman from 1943 - 1961
Sep. 15-Jan. 20
Opening Reception: Sep. 15, 6:00 pm
An exhibition displaying over 100 rare images documenting Eretz-Israel during the final years of the British Mandate and Israel's struggle for survival during its first thirteen years. Goldman's privileged access - as a British Army member and later as a journalist befriended by Israeli leaders - offered a front-row perspective of personal moments at a time of sweeping, historic change. Goldman was a Hungarian-born photojournalist who fled from Budapest in 1940 with his wife Dina to escape Nazism. Goldman’ s simply composed, brightly lit shots represent more than a bystander's snapshots at a turning point for the Middle East. His images document events, families, leaders, struggles, and hopes, from the period of the British Mandate in Palestine and the arrival of Holocaust survivor immigrants, to the War of Independence, the formative years of kibbutz and agricultural life in the young state, and the development of Tel Aviv as a modern city.
Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion Museum, One West 4th Street (between Broadway and Mercer Street). For more information please call: (212) 824-2205 or visit: http://www.huc.edu/museums/ny/

Awakening - Tal Shochat
Sep. 8 through Oct. 22
Opening Reception: Sep. 8, 6pm
Tal Shochat’s first solo show in North America is a series of 10 color photographs of various sizes, in which Shochat appropriates the concept of perceived beauty, blending interior with exterior, to highlight the unpredictable boundary between the real and the artificial. Shochat depicts portraits of women and of trees with various calculated backdrops that on first glance look very natural, yet on further observance appear magically produced. Shochat’s photographs deliberately juxtapose basic cultural icons with presumed expectations; nature and artifice combined in what is neither a real nor a natural scene. Wallpaper from the 1960s is suspended on scaffolding out of doors, in front of a nine-foot lemon tree; photographed at night with artificial lighting to create a work of art that is both, simultaneously, in nature and yet de-contextualized from it.
Andrea Meislin Gallery. 526 W 26th St., Suite 214. For more information call: 212-627-2552 or visit: http://www.andreameislin.com/

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