Stories of Endless Possibility: Material Preservation & Jewish Expression
About this Event
Standing at 606 South Elm Street in the historic downtown of Greensboro, North Carolina is a three-story building that contains endless possibility. Since 2005, this building has became known as Elsewhere, a living museum and artist residency; however, from 1955 to 1997, this building was a second-hand store owned and run by Sylvia Gray, a Southern Jewish woman who filled the floors with American material goods from buttons and dishes to toys, ribbon, clothes, books, and so much more. Six years after Sylvia passed away in 1997, her grandson, George Scheer, re-opened the building’s locked doors and found all of its contents inside and untouched. Inspired to transform Sylvia’s material “collection” into an experimental museum and art space, George and his co-founder curated a material space informed by philosophies of creative preservation and world-building. By examining Elsewhere’s annual “Radical Seder” that weaves the building’s story and their preservation philosophy into the ancient Passover ritual, as well as other instances of Jewish expression that intersect with Elsewhere’s material collection, this talk considers how Elsewhere’s material potential and creative preservation are informed by and reanimate Jewish values.
Gabrielle A. Berlinger is associate professor of American studies and folklore and Babette S. and Bernard J. Tanenbaum Scholar in Jewish History and Culture at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC). As a folklorist and ethnologist, she studies the nature and significance of vernacular architecture and ritual practice, particularly in contemporary Jewish communities. Her article, “ in the Garden of Hope” in Buildings & Landscapes: Journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum (University of Minnesota Press, 2017), received the 2019 Catherine Bishir Prize from the Vernacular Architecture Forum and is drawn from fieldwork for her book, (Indiana University Press, 2017). She is also coeditor of The Lives of Jewish Things: Collecting and Curating Material Culture (Wayne State University Press, 2024). Before joining the faculty at UNC, Gabrielle was an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the “Cultures of Conservation” initiative at Bard Graduate Center in New York City. There, her research and teaching centered on an ethnographic project at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum in which she documented the preservation process of the museum’s nineteenth-century tenement apartment building—a study that related issues of historic preservation, immigrant social history, heritage management, and museum practice in the reconciliation of physical and cultural conservation needs.
This talk is a part of the Gale Collaborative on Jewish Life in the Americas Lecture Series.
Lunch will be provided for those who register by Sunday, August 30th
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