On the National Language: The Poetry of America's Endangered Tongues

Language is more than an essential tool of communication. It connects us to our culture, to those who came before us. On the National Language: The Poetry of America’s Endangered Tongues shines a light on languages at risk of disappearing and on those helping to keep them alive. It also invites us to reflect on the rich linguistic diversity and complex cultural heritage of the United States.   

This exhibition features forty-six portraits of speakers and students of endangered languages living in the US—from a Tongva speaker in Los Angeles to a Yiddish speaker in Montana. Artist B.A. Van Sise collaborated with each of the subjects on developing their portraits. Accompanying each photograph is a word or phrase usually chosen by the subject in their endangered language, along with poetic interpretations by the artist and subject. He produced seventy-two works total in this series, each featuring a different language and portrait subject.

Tour Schedule

• Skirball Cultural Center, Los Angeles, CA, October 14, 2024–March 2, 2025

Image: PEND D'OREILLE, x̣sčewlši | growing old in a good way, Stephen Small Salmon, Saint Ignatius, Montana. Photo by B.A. Van Sise.

Away in the Catskills: Summers, Sour Cream, and Dirty Dancing

Away in the Catskills: Summers, Sour Cream, and Dirty Dancing by Marisa J. Futernick

Artist Marisa J. Futernick sifts through inherited and imagined memories of family vacations at Jewish resorts in New York’s Catskill Mountains to tell a broader story about leisure, class, and the lives of women in mid-century America (1945–1968).  

Colloquially known as the “Borscht Belt,” this region catered to working- and middle-class American Jewish families who, along with other minority groups, were excluded from many leisure spaces. The Catskills offered vacationers a break from wage labor and some forms of domestic labor, as well as a safe and welcoming place to enjoy family time.  

Recreation is a key theme of this exhibition, which features a series of fifteen prints drawn from vintage color slides of the artist’s maternal family on vacation in the Catskills during the 1960s. These prints capture the pleasure and freedom that families like Futernick’s experienced in the Catskills. 

In addition to Futernick’s photographic prints, the exhibition includes an installation created from the artist’s family mementos with an accompanying zine, using objects to connect to what leisure looked and felt like for Jewish vacationers.  

A sense of longing infuses Away in the Catskills—not just for a time and place that no longer exists, but also for a deeper sense of belonging. Futernick conducted extensive archival and field research for this exhibition to create a new video artwork comprised of several hundred still photographs, with voiceover narration by the artist. In this video work, she juxtaposes her mother’s and grandmother’s strong feelings of Jewish community—bolstered by their experiences in the Catskills—with her own relative lack thereof, provoking a conversation about assimilation and loss. 

Tour Schedule

• Skirball Cultural Center, Los Angeles, CA, May 1 - August 31, 2025

Image: Marisa J. Futernick, "Do the Watusi" from Dirty Dancing, 2017, series of fifteen 36 x 24 inch archival pigment prints on Hahnemühle Photo Rag Bright White paper.