Exhibition
Away in the Catskills: Summers, Sour Cream, and Dirty Dancing
1 May 2025 – 31 Aug 2025
Regular hours
- Thursday
- 12:00 – 17:00
- Friday
- 12:00 – 17:00
- Saturday
- 10:00 – 17:00
- Sunday
- 10:00 – 17:00
- Tuesday
- 12:00 – 17:00
- Wednesday
- 12:00 – 17:00
Address
- 2701 N. Sepulveda Blvd.
- Los Angeles
California - CA 90049
- United States
About
Pack your bags and explore inherited and imagined memories of vacations in the Catskills where Jewish families experienced a safe and welcoming place to enjoy time together. LA-based artist Marisa J. Futernick looks into her mother’s and grandmother’s summer vacations in this playful, loving, and meditative body of contemporary artworks, provoking questions about leisure, loss, and what it means to live in diaspora.
About the Exhibition
This contemporary art exhibition explores inherited and imagined memories of Jewish resorts in New York’s Catskill Mountains at mid-century (1945–1968). LA-based artist Marisa J. Futernick looks deeply into her mother's and grandmother's summer vacations in this by turns playful, loving, and meditative body of work, which provokes questions about leisure, loss, and what it means to live in diaspora.
Colloquially known as the “Borscht Belt,” this region catered to working- and middle-class American Jewish families who, along with other minority groups, were excluded from many leisure spaces. The Catskills offered vacationers a break from wage labor and some forms of domestic labor, as well as a safe and welcoming place to enjoy family time.
This exhibition features:
- A series of fifteen prints drawn from vintage color slides of the artist's maternal family on vacation in the Catskills during the 1960s, capturing the pleasure and freedom that families like Futernick’s experienced in the Catskills.
- An installation created from the artist’s family mementos with an accompanying zine, using objects to connect to what leisure looked and felt like for Jewish vacationers.
- A new video artwork comprised of several hundred still photographs, with voiceover narration by the artist. In this video work, Futernick juxtaposes her mother’s and grandmother’s strong feelings of Jewish community—bolstered by their experiences in the Catskills—with her own relative lack thereof, provoking a conversation about assimilation and loss.
