Featured item from THE LIST: Brenda Zlamany, reception September 17

To mark the 100th anniversary of the Hebrew Home for the Aged in the Bronx, the Derfner Judaica Museum (which is located in the home and where a version of this exhibition was seen last year) commissioned portrait artist Brenda Zlamany to paint 100 of its residents. As she told Leslie Wayne in a 2017 “studio visit” at artcritical, “In 100/100, each painting took around an hour. My goal was to paint 6-8 portraits a day. For various reasons, many of the subjects could not hold the pose so I worked in a state of heightened awareness, often orbiting the subject with my paints in an attempt to catch a glimpse of their face. Because I grew up with the Sicilian tradition of ‘Malocchio,’ a tradition where children are discouraged from making eye contact with elderly people for fear of getting bad luck, the project was pretty intense initially.”