“From Chabad to Rothko to Woodstock:
Yale Epstein, a Jewish Artist in the 20th Century”

Join Yale Epstein in conversation with his son, Marc Michael Epstein, our recent 2013 Community Scholar, for a fascinating, warm and funny perspective on the relationship of Jews as artists to abstraction, and the role of the emergent artist in the 20th century.

Yale Epstein, born in New Haven Connecticut in 1934, is a Jewish artist whose lyrical and powerful landscape abstractions have captured the imagination of a generation. His work is widely appreciated by discriminating private collectors and in public venues from the Brooklyn Museum to the Print Collection of the National Library of France.

His personal, artistic and intellectual odyssey, from the very “fount and origin” of Chabad Hassidism in America, through the Art Students’ League and Brooklyn College under the tutelage of Mark Rothko and Ad Reinhardt, to Woodstock, just as it was beginning to develop as a mecca for artists, is a compelling story.

Marc Michael Epstein is the product of a mixed marriage between the scions of Slonimer and Lubavitcher Hassidim and Romanian socialists, and grew up, rather confused, but happy, in Brooklyn, New York. He is currently Professor of Religion at Vassar College, where he has been teaching since 1992, and was the first Director of Jewish Studies.

At Vassar, he teaches courses on medieval Christianity, religion, arts and politics, and Jewish texts and sources. He is a graduate of Oberlin College, received the PhD at Yale University, and did much of his graduate research at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He has written numerous articles and three books on various topics in visual and material culture produced by, for, and about Jews. His most recent book, The Medieval Haggadah: Art, Narrative, and Religious Imagination (Yale, 2011) was selected by the London Times Literary Supplement as one of the best books of 2011.

During the 80s, Epstein was Director of the Hebrew Books and Manuscripts division of Sotheby’s Judaica department, and continues to serve as consultant to various libraries, auction houses, museums and private collectors throughout the world, among them the Herbert C. and Eileen Bernard Museum at Temple Emanu-El in New York City, for which he curated the inaugural exhibition, and currently serves as consultant for the Fowler Museum at UCLA, where he is in the process of helping plan a major exhibition on aspects of Kabbalah and its relationship to visual culture.