IN SEARCH OF THE SYNAGOGUES OF SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA

Watercolors by JAY A. WARONKER

The exhibition can be viewed
September 4 through January 10, 2009

Opening reception:
Friday Sept 4, 6:30 - 7:30 pm
following 5:30 Shabbat Services

The artist will speak following Services.

Works will be on view in the Chapel Hallway, Martin Meyer Reception Room, and the foyer of the Main Sanctuary.

Jay A. Waronker, born in Atlanta, Georgia, was educated in architecture at the University of Michigan, Harvard University, and Cornell University. In 1994, he established an architectural practice in Atlanta specializing in residential design, where he completed several published and awarded-winning projects. For years Mr. Waronker has taught at Southern Polytechnic State University in Atlanta, where he also served as the interim chair of its Department of Architecture. He has served on the faculties of Georgia Institute of Technology, Emory University, North Dakota State University, and Duksung University in Seoul, Korea, in a visiting capacity. During the summer of 2009 he was a visiting professor of architecture at North China University of Technology in Beijing.


In 1990 Mr. Waronker was awarded grants through the Asian Cultural Council, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture to begin documenting India’s thirty-four synagogues. He returned to India on numerous occasions for this project on additional grants from several foundations including the National Endowment for the Arts. As a Fulbright Scholar, he initiated a joint effort to restore and make use of the abandoned Cochin synagogues in southern India, and in 2005, to found India’s first Jewish museum. An exhibit of watercolors that Mr. Waronker completed during his work in India was hosted by the Fine Museum in 2004.

In 2005 Mr. Waronker spent seven months in southern Africa, where he documented the synagogues of Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Namibia, and a section of South Africa. Through another Fulbright grant, he completed watercolors and a history on these buildings. In 2008, Mr. Waronker returned to sub-Saharan Africa to expand his work. He has completed a first-ever portfolio of meticulously detailed interior and exterior watercolors of the synagogues and other Jewish architecture found throughout Africa, where few of these synagogues are regularly used.

Mr. Waronker’s watercolors have been widely exhibited at Jewish and non-Jewish venues. His work and writing are featured in India’s Jewish Heritage: Ritual, Art, and Life-Cycle; and Jay Waronker: India’s Synagogues; as well as other publications.

Included in this exhibition are many of the renderings by Mr. Waronker from his African portfolio, in watercolors with touches of color pencil. The watercolors do not document the buildings in their perfect state, but rather the true condition at the time of Waronker’s visit. As a body of work, they illuminate a small but important fragment of Jewish architecture and history at the risk of becoming lost and forgotten forever.