Ben Shahn @ Jewish Museum, NYC - 'On Nonconformity' - A Retrospective Exhibition + Catalogue

Ben Shahn, On Nonconformity

Jewish Museum, New York

May 23 — October 12, 2025

The Jewish Museum presents the first U.S. retrospective in nearly half a century dedicated to social realist artist and activist BEN SHAHN (1898-1969). Ben Shahn, On Nonconformity examines the prolific and progressive artist’s commitment to chronicling and confronting crucial issues of his era, spanning from the Great Depression to the Vietnam War, as well as his exploration of spirituality and Jewish texts. Featuring 175 artworks and objects from the 1930s to the 1960s, including paintings, mural studies, prints, photographs, commercial designs, and ephemera, the exhibition highlights the enduring relevance of Shahn’s art across media, while revealing new insights into the complexity of his aesthetic and his decisive shift from documentary to allegorical and poetic styles in pursuit of a visual language that would resonate widely.

Ben Shahn, On Nonconformity extends the Jewish Museum’s history of exploring Shahn’s far-reaching ideas and deep impact of the artist. The exhibition is organized by Dr. Laura Katzman, guest curator, in collaboration with Dr. Stephen Brown, Jewish Museum curator, and is drawn from the recent retrospective curated by Dr. Katzman at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid.

“Ben Shahn, On Nonconformity showcases the extraordinary work of a pioneering artist whose commitment to social justice across ethnic, class, and racial divides could not have greater relevance today,” said James S. Snyder, Helen Goldsmith Menschel Director. “There is no better place for this timely exhibition than the Jewish Museum, which presented Shahn’s last U.S. retrospective in 1976. The affirmation of shared universal humanity in his art parallels the Jewish Museum’s own mandate to explore the cross-cultural connectedness of Jewish experience throughout the global diaspora over 3,500 years.”

The exhibition draws its title from Ben Shahn’s credo of “nonconformity,” which the artist asserted as an indispensable precondition for both significant artistic production and all great societal change. This philosophy is centered in the exhibition as the foundational thread that runs through the artist’s oeuvre, which investigates issues such as unemployment, discrimination, authoritarianism, and threats to freedom of expression, while championing labor, civil, and human rights. Shahn’s later spiritual work, which embraces the Hebrew language and biblical stories, also reflects his exploration of a tradition of social justice activism within Jewish culture.

Born to a Jewish family in Russian-controlled Lithuania, Ben Shahn immigrated to the United States with his family in 1906. He began his career as a lithographer, mastering drawing, engraving, and typography, before expanding and experimenting across a vast array of mediums. The exhibition demonstrates Shahn’s rejection of a strict hierarchy among mediums, based on a belief in the power of images in all forms to stir the conscience of the public.

“Ben Shahn, On Nonconformity offers a reappraisal of the artist through a contemporary lens,” said Dr. Laura Katzman, guest curator. “Shahn’s understanding of art’s critical role in the perpetual struggle for a more just future resonates powerfully today. The exhibition invites visitors to examine the issues that were important to Shahn through our modern understanding of social justice. It also uplifts the richness and complexity of his aesthetic, which drew inspiration from various artistic movements in the postwar era—from abstract expressionism to conceptual art—and capitalized on the reach of mass media, raising commercial production to a high art.”

“Ben Shahn is one of the great American artists of the twentieth century who believed in the value of dissent and the essential function of art in the life of a democratic society,” said Dr. Stephen Brown, Jewish Museum curator. “The first major presentation of his work in the U.S. in decades, the Jewish Museum exhibition is something of a homecoming for Shahn, who has been part of our collection since 1947 and who was educated and politicized in New York City.”

The exhibition includes artwork and ephemera from throughout Shahn’s career, on loan from more than 30 museums, galleries, and private collections. Across seven sections, Ben Shahn, On Nonconformity explores the artist’s multifaceted use of photography and mass media, his inventive re-purposing of imagery across media, and his layered interrelations of word and image. The sections are organized thematically around the most pressing issues of Shahn’s time, including:

— Art and Activism encompasses Shahn’s earliest social realist work from the 1930s, highlighting the artist’s response to high-profile injustices perpetrated by the American judicial system;

—- A New Deal for Art presents Shahn’s powerful photographs, posters, and mural studies made for U.S. government art projects that championed programs aimed at alleviating the devastation wrought by the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl. Also on view are Shahn’s “personal realist” paintings, which dignify the ordinariness of everyday life that he encountered on his photographic travels for New Deal agencies;

— The Labor Movement features Shahn’s mass-produced posters and graphics that speak to his commitment to the cause of labor and to promoting the dignity of manual labor, executed in the mid-1940s when he led the Graphic Arts Division of the Congress of Industrial Organizations’ Political Action Committee;

— War and Its Aftermath explores Shahn’s work created both during and after World War II: propagandistic posters commissioned by the Office of War Information, which confront the horrors of war, and more reflective paintings that grapple with wartime destruction and postwar liberation;

— Age of Anxiety: The Cold War includes the works Shahn made during the era of McCarthyism and the emergent Atomic Age, which both protest America’s anti-communist hysteria and warn of the looming nuclear threat both at home and abroad;

— The Struggle for Civil Rights reflects Shahn’s fervent support of the nonviolent movements for civil rights in the U.S. and for the broader resistance movements against colonialism that were rising up around the world in the 1950s and 1960s;

— Spirituality and Identity—the final section of the exhibition showcases Shahn’s return to the biblical stories and Hebrew texts he grew up with as a child, illuminating how re-engagement with his Jewish roots was yet another lens through which he commented critically on history and society.

Ben Shahn, On Nonconformity builds on the Jewish Museum’s long history of presenting Shahn’s work to American audiences. In 1976, the Museum hosted a major Ben Shahn retrospective, and in 1998, to mark Shahn’s centenary, organized Common Man, Mythic Vision: The Paintings of Ben Shahn, focusing on the role of allegory in the artist’s later, lesser-known paintings. Twenty-two years later, in 2020, the conceptual artist Jonathan Horowitz curated We Fight to Build a Free World, which situated Shahn’s work at the heart of an exhibition that examined how artists responded to cultural and political challenges with art primarily from the early 20th century to 2020.

Ben Shahn, On Nonconformity

Laura Katzman 

Contributions by Beatriz Cordero Martín, 

Christof Decker and John Fagg

Published by the Jewish Museum, New York and 

the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, 

in association with Princeton University Press

288 pages, 8 x 10.5 in., 290 color illus.

ISBN: 9780691273112 - Published: June 3, 2025

Book Cover image courtesy of Princeton University Press

Publication: The exhibition is accompanied by a richly illustrated catalogue, published by the Jewish Museum, New York, and the Museo Nacional Centro Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, in association with Princeton University Press. Drawing on media studies, cultural studies, and museological approaches, the catalogue brings international perspectives and new insights to the work of artist Ben Shahn. With a foreword by James S. Snyder, the book is authored by Laura Katzman, Professor of Art History at James Madison University, with contributions by Beatriz Cordero Martín, Professor of Art History at Saint Louis University, Madrid; Christof Decker, Professor of American Studies at Ludwig-Maxmilian University, Munich, Germany; and John Fagg, Senior Lecturer in American Literature and Cultures at the University of Birmingham, United Kingdom.

Ben Shahn, On Nonconformity was organized by Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, and adapted by the Jewish Museum, New York. The New York exhibition is curated by Dr. Laura Katzman, Professor of Art History at James Madison University, in collaboration with Dr. Stephen Brown, Curator at the Jewish Museum. Dr. Katzman also served as guest curator of the recent Ben Shahn exhibition in Madrid. 

JEWISH MUSEUM, NEW YORK

thejewishmuseum.org

Updated Post 24-10-2025

Konrad Cramer, Ralston Crawford, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Richard Pousette-Dart, Ben Shahn, and Charles Sheeler - Zabriskie Gallery, New York

Six American Painters and the Photograph
Zabriskie Gallery, New York
January 30 - March 17, 2001

Zabriskie Gallery presents Six American Painters and the Photograph. The six are Konrad Cramer, Ralston Crawford, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Richard Pousette-Dart, Ben Shahn, and Charles Sheeler. Most recognized as prominent American Modernist painters in the former half of the century, these artists were also accomplished photographers in their own right. This exhibition includes not only the six artists' photographs, but also examples of their paintings, drawings, and graphic work.

Jack-of-all-trades Charles Sheeler (1883-1965) took up photography in 1912 as a means of livelihood, working for Vogue and Vanity Fair. Whether working with fabric, silver, glass, paint, or photography, the center of focus was always the everyday objects themselves, and their objective representation - beauty in the utility. Light was "the great designer" that extracted, through contrast, new possibilities of form. His photographs of country furniture, early Doylestown interiors, and industrial subjects such as the Ford Rouge plant, realign Cubist proportions with American heritage, suggesting a new dimension of modern art. 

Ralston Crawford (1906-1975), like Sheeler, was versatile in numerous media and worked in a mode of synthetic Cubism. He was born in Saint Catharines, Ontario, the only son of a ship captain. By way of water, he journeyed down the East coast to Latin America as a seaman for the United Fruit Company prior to settling in Buffalo, shortly after high school graduation. He began photographing in the mid thirties while traveling in Louisiana and Florida, where he encountered the factories, docks, shipyards, and cemetaries which were to thematically preoccupy his art over the next four decades. Crawford wrote that, for him, photography was an "extension" of his viewing - physical and inner - experience. As evidenced in his geometric abstractions, from industrial landscapes to bombed buildings, it was this discerning mediation of images that added dimension while bringing visual order to the temperamental and chaotic world outside. 

Another New Yorker, Ben Shahn (1898-1969), was an immigrant from a socialist Jewish family who fled czarist Russia in 1906, settling in Brooklyn in 1946. During and after the depression, Shahn's camera became a tool for his political activism and artistic practice. He engaged himself in a manner of work production that abandoned a European-inflected modernism in exchange for an American social realism, the intention of which was to effect social change. In his photographs, Shahn addressed issues such as unemployment, poverty, immigration, race and class reform. His range included pictures from group protests, to "private" activity on the sidewalks of midtown and lower Manhattan, as well as the rural Southern and Midwestern U.S. Though little recognized early on, Shahn's photographs nonetheless contributed greatly to the genre of documentary photography.

For Richard Pousette-Dart (1916-1992), getting hold of a camera was the beginning of another obsessive artform. As a child he had built a pinhole camera, which began his fascination with "points of light," the ephemeral, epiphanic light that suggested for him "a material awareness of spirit." Having lived through the second world war, his work was partly shaped by its aftermath of spiritual and physical uncertainty. Like Rothko and Hoffman, he related to art in a sacred manner through pure forms, primitive myths, and symbolism. His still-lifes of nature from the 1940s appear like scientific exposures of stars and flowers, while his multiple-exposed portraits are pictorialistic composites at once romantic and psychological. 

Good friends Konrad Cramer (1888-1963) and Yasuo Kuniyoshi (1889-1953) were proponents of photographic experimentation, particularly with spatial possibilities of the light-drawn image. After successfully breaking away from the abstraction influenced by Cubism and the Blue Rider tones of Kandinsky, the former returned to representation and produced elegant solarizations, nudes, fractured still-lifes, and interior studies that reflected modern American imagery. Unto rural Woodstock environments he made fused application of Hambridge's neo-Greek formulations, old master techniques, and a Cubist-derived vocabulary, having subsequently turned to photography after the disillusionment of hard times in the 1930s. It was also at Woodstock in the 30s that Kuniyoshi abandoned his 8 x 10 frame camera, which he had used for commercial photography, for a new handheld. Having come to America in 1906 from Okayama, Japan, his story was one of a synthesis of European Modernism, Japanese art, and American folk art. Kuniyoshi's leisure photographs of Coney Island taken from the boardwalk were flattened picture planes that informed his paintings as they belied their Oriental influences.

With the advent of the practical Leica 35mm camera in 1935, the practice of taking photographs became a necessary "tool" for the advancement, but not usurpation of painting. At least, not at first. For all of these artists, the hierachy of mediums was superfluous in a time when photography was yet considered to be a fine art. In their eyes, painting and photography simply "accommodated" one another. As painters, these six American artists were greatly responsible for moving American art away from strict assimilation of styles, shifting modernism away from European sense and scenery to the vast urban, pastoral, and industrial landscapes which was America. As photographers, they were also pioneers of the silver print and harbingers of the camera's elevation to prominence in the art world.

ZABRISKIE GALLERY
41 East 57 Street, New York, NY 10022
www.zabriskiegallery.com