The ‘The Invisible Museum’ exhibition displays artifacts from daily lives of Jewish-Moroccan peoples, in and migrating from Africa.
Genre: Exhibition
Venue: Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life, 2121 Allston Way, UC Berkeley campus
Time: August 29 2017 till December 15 2017
Host: The Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life
Description: The Magnes has, since its inception in 1962, distinguished itself from other American Jewish museums by focusing on art and artefacts found outside European Jewish culture, and thus bringing to our attention material culture from North Africa, the Middle East, and the Indian subcontinent. Such longstanding focus is on full display in the museum’s stunning holdings from Jewish communities in Morocco — from Tétouan, Tangier, Casablanca, Fez, Marrakech, as well as locations in the Atlas mountains.
The hundreds of ritual objects, textiles, illustrated marriage contracts, and manuscripts at The Magnes provide us with a rich narrative that is at once ancient and modern. There are layers of memory and change everywhere, dating from the rise of Islam to the expulsion of Jews from the Iberian Peninsula, the European colonization of Africa, and the Holocaust. Most Moroccan Jews abandoned their ancestral home en masse during the 1950s, with smaller numbers remaining through the 1960s and 70s, but most did relocate primarily to Israel, France, and North America (especially Francophone Quebec). Brought from Morocco, their art and artefacts tell of a diaspora within the diaspora, a museum of the invisible, the texture of which has become preserved in public and private collections at The Magnes and now worldwide.
For more information, see the collection site here.
