Skirball Cultural Center

“For many, recollections of the Catskills glow with nostalgia. My work celebrates this deep joyfulness while also questioning the more complicated aspects of this place, both past and present, and its reflection of generational changes, especially for women.”—Marisa J. Futernick 

This contemporary art exhibition explores inherited and imagined memories of Jewish resorts in New York’s Catskill Mountains at mid-century (1945–1968). LA-based artist Marisa J. Futernick looks deeply into her mother's and grandmother's summer vacations in this by turns playful, loving, and meditative body of work, which provokes questions about leisure, loss, and what it means to live in diaspora.

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.  

This exhibition 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, capturing the pleasure and freedom that families like Futernick’s experienced in the Catskills.
• 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 new video artwork comprised of several hundred still photographs, with voiceover narration by the artist. In this video work, Futernick 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.

Docent Chats

Talk to one of our docents about this exhibition!
Beginning Thursday, June 5.
Tuesday–Friday, 12:30 pm
Saturday–Sunday, 10:30 am and 12:30 pm

Note: Docent Chats are subject to cancellation.

This exhibition was curated by Skirball Cultural Center Chief Curator Cate Thurston.

Marisa J. Futernick (b. 1980) is an LA-based interdisciplinary artist and writer who uses photography, text, painting, radio, and video installation to examine the less visible social and political histories of the United States.  

Her recent solo exhibitions include Concession at Murray State University in Murray, Kentucky (2025); Dirty Dancing: Revisiting the Catskills at Brandeis University, Boston (2023); and Popular Vote at Glendale Community College, Los Angeles (2022). Futernick’s work has been presented at numerous institutions including the Whitechapel Gallery, London; Royal Academy of Arts, London; ICA, London; The British Library, London; Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art, University of Nevada, Las Vegas; Harvard University; and Yale University.  

She has published several artist’s books, including 13 Presidents (Slimvolume, 2016), How I Taught Umberto Eco to Love the Bomb (RA Editions and California Fever Press, 2015), and The Watergate Complex (Rice + Toye, 2015). 

Futernick holds a BA from Yale University and an MFA from the Royal Academy Schools, London, with additional studies at Goldsmiths College, London. She was born in Detroit, Michigan and raised in Hartford, Connecticut. After fifteen years in London, Futernick now lives in Los Angeles where she is a core member of the activist group Artists 4 Democracy.