NEW YORK, NY.- The 2025 Studio Residency program will feature Jonathan Berger, an artist whose expansive projects often traverse space and time. Berger’s residency, titled Chapter One: Everything in Reverse, will present a handmade, scaled reconstruction of Kaunas, Lithuania, as the city existed in 1940, just before it came under Nazi occupation. The first attempt at an accurate model of the city from this pivotal moment, the piece will be based on a map made by the Russian-born, Lithuanian-based amateur cartographer Marija Oniščik. The model will be built on site over the course of the artist’s monthlong Studio residency by the community of craftspeople with whom Berger regularly collaborates. The process of assembly will be accompanied by a series of public programs that explore the personal relations and cultural histories prompted by the model.

The completed sculpture will serve as a major component of a forthcoming large-scale exhibition project, comprising a series of chapters that interweave multiple histories of diaspora and statelessness. For the last several years, Berger has researched these ideas within the context of the genealogies of his adoptive and chosen families, including the story of his mother, who as a young Jewish child was hidden by a Christian family in Kaunas during World War II. Berger’s choice to create the model is inspired in part by progressive Jewish ideas that permeated Eastern Europe before the war, as articulated in particular by the writing of Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz (1945–2018), founding director of Jews for Racial and Economic Justice (JFREJ). As a teenage member of that organization, Berger worked alongside Kaye/Kantrowitz, whose theory of “diasporism” articulated a non-nationalist form of Jewish identity. This antiracist and multiculturalist view drew on concepts that were central to the pre-WWII Jewish Labor Bund movement, which was founded in Lithuania and advocated for a notion of homeland based not on state or religion, but on the idea of “making home where we are.”

Working collectively to build a replica of his mother’s home city, Berger creates an occasion to consider the ideas that emerged from that place so that we can return to them today.

The studio will be open to the public on Friday evenings and weekends during the residency. Open evenings and weekends are included with Museum admission.
The residency will also include a day of public programs on Saturday, August 23.

Open hours on Friday evenings will take place on August 8 and August 15.

Open hours on weekends will take place on August 9, August 10, August 16, August 17, and August 24.

Organized by Thomas (T.) Jean Lax, Curator, with May Makki, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Media and Performance. Produced by Lizzie Gorfaine, Associate Director and Producer, with Aminah Ibrahim, Assistant Performance Coordinator, Performance and Live Programs.