The Jewish Museum of Maryland has opened a new exhibition, “Psychedelicatessen: A Powerful Dose of Art By Steve Marcus,” featuring artwork by the New York City native Marcus that blends the psychedelic hippie culture of the 1960s and Jewish culture.
The exhibition opened on June 22 and will remain in the museum until Oct. 19, leaving several months for the community to explore dozens of colorful and highly stylized pieces.
“Steve’s work is just really on fire right now. He’s presenting work all over the world. This is an original show, and it’s traveling from here to the Oregon Jewish Museum in Portland,” said Sol Davis, executive director of the JMM. “We’re thrilled to be the first to present this work. We’re trying to find so many ways to open conversations about Jewish experience and Jewish history and Jewish culture, and this is really doing it.”
Marcus started his explanation behind the cultural mashup represented in his work by going back to Israel, the beginnings of the Jewish diaspora and bread.
Marcus said that he finds it interesting that Jewish people scattered around the world and over hundreds of years developed different styles of clothing, recipes and traditions, which they all brought with them to the state of Israel.
“They say that Israel has the most varieties of bread in the entire world because everybody came from all these different countries. Whether it’s rye or pumpernickel or laffa or pita,” Marcus said. “Everybody brought back all these different bread recipes, and everybody adapted these different recipes and adapted it to make it kosher, and that’s one of the things that makes Israeli food so interesting.”
Marcus related that concept to his own personal diaspora growing up as a Jewish kid in New York City and entering the cultures of graffiti, punk rock, psychedelics and counterculture.
He said he was able to take all those elements from the various cultures he grew up in and incorporate them with his Jewishness, which made his work accessible to a wider audience.
“When I mash it up with Jewish culture and identity it’s accessible, not only to Jewish people, whether they’re right wing or left wing, religious or secular, but also people that even aren’t Jewish,” Marcus said. “Because that culture permeates all these other cultures, especially in the time that we’re living in with globalization and access to social media and the internet.”
But Marcus, in an art career starting in 1989 with the first purchase of his illustrations, has only been making Jewish-inspired art for about 16 years. The shift for Marcus came through tragedy, as his father suddenly died of a heart attack on Rosh Hashanah in 2009.
In the artist statement for the exhibition, Marcus wrote that the timing of his father’s death on a major Jewish holiday “sparked something deep, dormant, and mysterious within me.”
Marcus began saying Kaddish for his father three times a day and planned his whole daily schedule around services.
After five-and-a-half months on that journey, Marcus ended up in a yeshiva, where he has gone regularly since to learn Torah.
“Basically, at the same time [that I started going to the yeshiva], a bunch of old artwork that I had done related to this counterculture movement and things like that had been acquired for the permanent collection of the Oakland Museum of California,” Marcus said. “After that first museum acquisition, there was a Jewish museum that was interested in all the hip-hop, rock and roll, cannabis culture and offered me an exhibition. I was already kind of wanting to change up my artwork and what I was doing with it.”
As he started exploring the world of Jewish art, Marcus said he noticed that there wasn’t a lot of “hip, cool” Jewish art and realized that he could use his rapidly expanding Jewish knowledge and decades of American cultural experiences to create “kosher pop art.”
Marcus has been creating this kosher pop art and said he’s been able to do a lot of art shows around the world, bringing Jewish culture and making it accessible to global communities.
Marcus wrote in his artist statement that in meeting with Davis and the people from JMM, they had the collective vision to display this art collection and understand the role of contemporary Jewish art in balancing “the historically dark periods in Jewish history.”
“I feel very humbled and honored to have such an opportunity to go out into the world and contribute in such a way as to reveal Hashem in the world, give chizuk (strength) and chinuch (education) to Klal Yisrael, and be a good ambassador to the non-Jewish world,” Marcus said.
