Black Diamond Gallery, Brooklyn. 332 Hooper Street
Thursday, June 6th. 7 – 9 PM
JIMENA is excited to invite you to a special Happy Hour with drinks and mingling at the Black Diamond Gallery in Brooklyn with esteemed guest-speaker, Joseph Braude and a talk with artist, Lenore Mizrachi-Cohen. Joseph and Lenore will talk about their work to preserve and share the Middle Eastern heritage of Mizrahi and Sephardic Jews.
Joseph, JIMENA’s Arabic Outreach Director is an Iraqi Jew, Middle East specialist and strategic communications expert who has lived, worked and written extensively on Arab – Jewish relations in the Middle East and North Africa. Joseph is a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and senior advisor to the Al-Mesbar Center for Studies and Research in Dubai. He studied Near Eastern languages at Yale and Arabic and Islamic history at Princeton. Joseph developed his Arabic to broadcast quality over a seven-year stint on Moroccan national radio and added Persian to his Arabic and Hebrew as a graduate student at the University of Tehran. As JIMENA’s Arabic Outreach Director, Joseph and his team are educating and engaging over 75,000 young Arabs in the Middle East and North Africa every day.
About the Artist: Lenore Mizrachi-Cohen is a mixed media conceptual artist, currently based in Brooklyn. She received her BA in Art from Brooklyn College and has worked as an artist, graphic designer, and producer since 2009. A descendant of Syrian Jewish immigrants to the US, Lenore is interested in cultural heritage and its relevance to contemporary life. Her work has been exhibited in the US, Canada, and Israel. Lenore is also a street artist and has covered walls in Brooklyn and Jerusalem with middle-eastern motifs and phrases culled from both Hebrew and Arabic traditions. Lenore uses her own familial experience as a baseline to examine changing attitudes within generations of families who underwent forced migration and the dissonance between traditional values and contemporary culture.
About the exhibition: “CULTURE: SHOCK” explores cultural heritage and its influence, or lack thereof, on modern life. The exhibition is comprised of two distinct series of mixed media works that invite the viewer to evaluate the ways we differ from, are improving on, or forgetting parts of our past. The exhibition features two series of mixed media works on paper and an immersive 380 square foot mural of Arabic calligraphy.
