This is the exhibition we need right now: sunshine, puffy brushings, long acrylic nails. We’re smiling just thinking about it!
The Musée du Montréal Juif presents an exhibition on loan from the Jewish Museum of Florida-FIU, mixing the photos of Andy Sweet, an iconic photographer of the 70s and 80s, taken in Florida, with the nostalgic, fly-on-the-wall ceramics of young Toronto artist Jonah Strub.
Sweet’s photos were taken between 1977 and 1980 on the palm-fringed beaches and in the air-conditioned rooms of South Beach, where some 20,000 Jewish seniors – many of them Holocaust survivors – settled in the Miami neighborhood. It’s a modern shtetl under the sun; one of those small, tightly-woven, predominantly Jewish communities that were all over Eastern Europe before the Second World War.
Untitled (South Beach 1977-1980)
The exhibition is on the second floor of the Musée du Montréal Juif building on Boulevard Saint Laurent, near the Laurier metro station. The building is old, and you take two flights of stairs into a communal space that feels more like a large apartment than a museum – where you feel at home, more a visitor than a spectator.
We’re in a large room with creaky wooden floors, and immediately smile at Strub’s first ceramic, depicting a lady with long acrylic fingernails taking a pickle out of a pot. The work is titled Plein d’aigreur (2024).
The acid colors of the ’70s and ’80s, the kitsch of the big plastic glasses and printed outfits of the South Beach shtetl and the scenes of everyday life in Sweet’s photographs present a kind of sweet Polaroid of the North American snowbird phenomenon and North American Jewish communities that makes you want to call your grandmother and bring her flowers, and a bit too, to pop down to Florida for spring break… Is it too late to book your tickets?
You can also visit the exhibition as part of the Nuit Blanche from Saturday, March 1 to 2, between 8pm and 1am – accompanied by vintage Miami vinyl spinned by rapper and producer Socalled…
The Montreal Jewish Museum is located at 5220 Boulevard Saint-Laurent, Montreal QC H2T 1S1.