arts & culture
Temple Judea Museum to Show
Climate Crisis Exhibit at MCCC
SASHA ROGELBERG | STAFF WRITER
T emple Judea Museum’s “Out of
the Whirlwind: Fire, Air, Water,
Earth; Reflections and Forecasts
on Global Warming and Climate
Change” was dreamed up long before
COVID began. For TJM director and
curator Rita Poley, there’s never been a
more apt time to put on the exhibit.

The art exhibit, opening Aug. 26 at
Montgomery County Community
College, is a study on the impacts of global
warming, inspired by Jewish texts replete
with commentary on the subject. A recent
heat wave across Philadelphia, other parts
of the U.S. and Europe only made the
exhibit’s theme more appropriate.

“From the Zohar to the Talmud to the
Bible, it was just this whole unfolding of
beautiful references and thought about
nature as a force,” Poley said. “And that
was how we gravitated to seeing this
theme of the elements and global warm-
ing as a threat to nature as a man-made
problem.” The exhibit from TJM, part of Reform
Congregation Keneseth Israel in Elkins
Park, will feature the works of 17 art-
ists from the TJM Artists’ Collaborative,
a group of professional artists and KI
members, and 14 Jewish guest artists
from the community. MCCC Gallery
Director Patrick Rodgers will help Poley
curate the pieces.

Even a month before the exhibit
opens, Poley and Rodgers are putting
in the hours to organize the show.

Though the weeks leading up to the
exhibit’s Aug. 22 installation are “the
calm before the storm,” “Whirlwind”
has lived up to its name; it’s a show
three years in the making.

In late 2019, Marlene Adler, chair of
the Artists’ Collaborative, approached
Rodgers, a longtime collaborator, about
a show on climate change. Even at the
onset of the pandemic, the commitment
to bringing the exhibit to fruition was
unwavering. “It’s a signal of how important a topic
climate change is,” Rodgers said. “On
top of all that, we’ve just kept at it all
these years.”
Diane Pieri’s “Fire Danger High” about the California wild fires she encountered
while living there in the 1990s
Courtesy of Rita Poley
At this point, artists have submitted
all pieces for the exhibit and are finaliz-
ing the descriptions that will accompany
the pieces. Though Poley and Rodgers
selected each piece specifically for the
show, they will not be able to organize
and curate the pieces in the space until
four days before the exhibit opening.

Despite the crunched timeline, there’s
little Rodgers can do to prepare for the
layout of the exhibit beyond painting
walls and pedestals.

“You never know how everything is
going to play until it’s all in front of you,”
he said. “And that process is just sort of
magical and fun in its own way.”
Though the pieces range from paint-
ings to sculptures, Poley believes they
are all cohesive in their relevance to the
show’s theme.

“It was pretty obvious that the artists
who got it really got it,” Poley said.

“That they were moved by the subject,
moved by what’s going on in our envi-
ronment today.”
The pieces — beyond showing one of
the fire, air, water and earth elements —
also have a layer of commentary, often
somber, about climate change.

“Some artists were submitting artwork
that was like pretty trees,” Poley said.

“I had to say to them, ‘This isn’t about
pretty trees.’”
Diane Pieri, a guest artist for the
exhibit, is showing her series “Fire Danger
High” about forest fires in California,
where she lived in the 1990s. She com-
pleted the pieces in 1997, but according
to Poley, they fit with the theme even 25
years later.

“Fire Danger High” was created on
large sheets of papyrus that Pieri set
on fire, creating splotches of scorch
marks. Gold leaf and flowers adorn the
destroyed papyrus.

“Flowers, to me, represented a kind
of beauty, and the fire wasn’t. It was a
destroying factor,” Pieri said.

The purpose of the pieces is to draw in
the viewer to the gold and floral patterns,
but as the viewer pays more attention to
the piece, they realize its deeper meaning.

Leon Chudzinski, a newer member of
TJM’s Artists’ Collaborative, also uses gold
in his piece “Legacy,” a sculpture made out
of found materials from Chudzinski’s gar-
den and backyard shed, including chicken
wire, stakes and a hose reel.

The sculpture, which was created spe-
cifically for the exhibit, is shaped like
an hourglass and spins, showing off a
moving tornado at the top of the hour-
glass feeding into the bottom chamber
filled with gold “sand.” In addition to
showing the increase in natural disasters
climate change will cause, the piece also
Leon Chudzinksi’s “Legacy” about
the inherited burden of the younger
generation addressing climate change
illustrates that the younger generation
is running out of time to fix the climate
crisis. The gold represents the wealth
the older generation extracted by using
natural resources at the expense of the
environment, Chudzinski said.

“As part of our [Jewish] teachings,
obviously we all should be stewards of
the Earth,” he said. “We all should care;
we all should give back.”
“Out of the Whirlwind: Fire, Air,
Water, Earth” will be exhibited at
MONTCO’s Blue Bell campus from Aug.

26 to Sept. 30. For more information,
visit kenesethisrael.org/out-of-the-whirl-
wind. JE
srogelberg@midatlanticmedia.com JEWISHEXPONENT.COM
21