MELISSA SHIFf (1967-2025)
A retrospective exhibition will be announced.
Elijah Chair
Elijah Chair was made for Shiff's Times Square Seder as part of her Multi-Media Art Activist Passover event. This video sculpture was acquired by the Jewish Museum in New York for their permanent collection and proved to be Shiff's breakthrough piece. Shiff's art practice literally went from the street to the Museum.
Excerpt from Professor Terry Barrett's textbook Making Art: Form and Meaning (Pages 223-225)
"Melissa Shiff is a contemporary individual artist also working with important social issues in the context of her Jewish heritage. Elijah Chair, is an antique rocking chair with an embedded video monitor that shows doors opening into various homes - rich, poor, and in between.
She intends the chair to serve as a meditation on unconditional hospitality in urban America. For the chair, Shiff drew upon Jewish customs related to the prophet Elijah: the opening of the door for the prophet Elijah and the setting of a chair for him. The artist created the chair to employ the prophet in the service of social action. For Shiff, the piece documents the staggering divide of wealth in this city {Manhattan] of extremes in an effort to show that Elijah signifies the hospitality and openness to the Other that must occur. Shiff embraces her religion and her politics in her art that confronts Jews as Others, and she shows in her artifact that the Jewish tradition embraces otherness."
Exhibitions
Times Square Seder
Three store front windows,
42nd street, New York, NY
March 2002
Elijah Chair: Art, Ritual, and Social Action
The Jewish Museum, New York, NY
February 6 - April 11, 2004
Curator: Andrew Ingall
Repairing the World: Contemporary Ritual Art
The Jewish Museum, New York, NY
November 4, 2007 - March 16, 2008
Curator: Susan Braunstein
Credits
Artist: Melissa Shiff