The Magnes opens with new exhibition

The Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life at the University of California, Berkeley opens on Tuesday, August 29th, for the fall 2023 semester with a new exhibition, Cities and Wars: Roman Vishniac in Berlin and Jerusalem 1947-1967.

Drawing from the vast Roman Vishniac Archive, Cities and Wars brings together renowned photographer Roman Vishniac’s previously unseen images of Berlin in 1947 after the Second World War and Jerusalem in 1967 after the Six-Day War. The exhibition highlights the unique gaze of the artist, who considered both cities “home,” and carefully chronicles the devastating effects of war on urban life.

Along with Cities and Wars, The Magnes has three additional exhibitions on display.

Time Capsules. The Magnes: 10 Years at UC Berkeley is both a retrospective and an examination of the role of cultural heritage collections in imagining the future of Jewish memory. This installation showcases a selection of 10 exhibitions from the museum’s first 10 years at UC Berkeley.

The inaugural installation from the Roman Vishniac Archive, An Archive of Archives: Roman Vishniac’s Exhibition History | New York, 1971-72 shares some of Vishniac’s most iconic images documenting Jewish life and communities in Eastern Europe before the Holocaust. 

In the permanent collection installation, artist and UC Berkeley Professor Greg Niemeyer’s contemporary work, GifCollider: Chapter 11. Night Vision, is an ever changing image tracing the shape of the menorah in a sea of GIF animations—layering, moving, and blurring them to suggest stratas of digital memory.

The museum will be open to the public Tuesdays and Wednesdays from 11:00 am to 4:00 pm and open late on Thursdays from 11:00 am to 7:00 pm. Sunday hours from 11:00 am to 4:00 pm will begin on October 8, 2023. Admission is free.

The Magnes is located one block from UC Berkeley and one block from the Downtown Berkeley BART station at 2121 Allston Way in Berkeley.

The Magnes Collection is currently processing the Roman Vishniac Archive. Materials from the archive are not yet available.