Elsewhere: Archive, Museum, and Catalyst of Change
A Leon Levy Foundation Lecture in Jewish Material Culture by Gabrielle A. Berlinger (University of North Carolina)

This series explores how three ordinary buildings have been transformed into extraordinary spaces for religious, social, and historic Jewish purpose: a medical clinic in Brooklyn, New York, a second-hand store in Greensboro, North Carolina, and a schoolhouse in southern Germany. Although geographically, temporally, and culturally distinct from one another, all three sites engage with Jewish memory, values, and practice through creative approaches to the preservation of these buildings and their material contents. Using strategies of reconstruction, restoration, and even deconstruction of these buildings and the objects within, the people who steward these sites nurture deep and dynamic relationships between people, objects, and a sense of belonging in each environment.

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Since 2005, the building at 606 South Elm Street in downtown Greensboro, North Carolina, has been known as Elsewhere—a living museum and artist residency. However, from 1955–97, this three-story building was a second-hand store owned and run by Sylvia Gray, a Southern Jewish woman who filled the building with American material goods, from buttons and dishes to toys, ribbon, clothes, books, and more. Six years after she passed away in 1997, her grandson, George Scheer, opened the building’s locked doors, found all of its contents untouched, and decided to transform Sylvia’s material “collection” into an experimental museum and art space. By examining Elsewhere’s annual “Radical Seder” that weaves the building’s story and preservation philosophy into the ancient Passover ritual, as well as other instances of Jewish expression that intersect with Elsewhere’s material collection, Gabrielle Berlinger—in conversation with Scheer—considers how Elsewhere’s material world and creative preservation are informed by and reanimate Jewish values.

November 13 at 6pm

38 West 86th Street, BGC Lecture Hall