We Fight to Build a Free World: An Exhibition by Jonathan Horowitz

What you are looking at

The photograph shows the entrance to the exhibition at the Jewish Museum on Fifth Avenue. The museum occupies a Gothic-revival mansion, and its carved wood paneling, plaster ornament and brass chandelier frame the doorway. On the deep green wall to the right hangs a large white sign in heavy black capitals: WE FIGHT TO BUILD A FREE WORLD, and below it, AN EXHIBITION BY JONATHAN HOROWITZ. Through the doorway, in the next gallery, a red wall is hung in a grid with posters of different colors and designs. Blue floor markers, spaced along the parquet, are a reminder of the date: the show opened during the Covid-19 pandemic, with social distancing in place.

The exhibition

The exhibition was organized by Jonathan Horowitz, a New York artist known for work that mixes politics, pop culture and mass media. It ran from 1 October 2020 to 14 February 2021, after being postponed from its planned opening in March 2020 because of the pandemic. Horowitz began the project in 2017 in response to a rise in antisemitism, and broadened it to examine how artists have responded to authoritarianism, xenophobia, racism and other forms of bigotry, and to questions of immigration, assimilation and identity.

The title is adapted from a Ben Shahn painting of about 1942, We Fight for a Free World!, which was included. The museum described more than 80 works and over 70 voices. They ranged from 1930s and 1940s American social realism to works by Philip Evergood, Max Weber, Charles White, Robert Colescott, Adrian Piper, Kara Walker, Glenn Ligon, Huma Bhabha, Asco and Andy Warhol, alongside new works by Horowitz himself.

The poster wall

At the heart of the show were 36 protest posters commissioned from contemporary artists, among them Judith Bernstein, Marcel Dzama, Kim Gordon with Jason Smith, Cheyenne Julien, Christine Sun Kim, Guadalupe Maravilla and Marilyn Minter. These are the posters visible through the doorway, hung edge to edge like a street hoarding. The format deliberately echoes the wartime and political posters of the 1930s and 1940s that appear elsewhere in the show, setting the past and the present side by side.

Reception

Critics praised the range of the selection. The Guardian called the show comprehensive and powerful, and The New York Times noted its unexpected juxtapositions. For an artist curating rather than exhibiting his own work alone, the show was also a statement of method: Horowitz treats history as raw material to be rearranged.

Related works

See other works by the artist, Hillary Clinton is a Person Too, Black Dot Project and Donation Cubes, and his page, Jonathan Horowitz.