MoMA - Studio Residency: Jonathan Berger
Sat, Aug 02
|MoMA
Witness memory take shape. In this intimate MoMA residency, Jonathan Berger and collaborators build a handmade model of Kaunas, Lithuania in 1940, tracing stories of diaspora, identity, and resistance.
Time & Location
Aug 02, 2025, 7:00 AM – Aug 24, 2025, 11:00 PM
MoMA, 11 W 53rd St, New York, NY 10019, USA
About the event
August 2–24, 2025
The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)
Visit MoMA.org
How do we build a home where history tried to erase us?During his three-week Studio Residency at MoMA, artist Jonathan Berger leads a collaborative effort to reconstruct a detailed scale model of Kaunas, Lithuania as it existed in 1940, just before Nazi occupation. Created in partnership with a team of craftspeople, the model is based on the research of amateur cartographer Marija Oniščik and acts as both memory work and resistance.
Berger pairs this labor of reconstruction with archival materials from writer and activist Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz, a pioneering voice in Jewish feminist and antiracist thought. Drawing on her idea of “diasporism”—a non-nationalist form of Jewish belonging—Berger weaves together personal and political history, from his mother’s survival in Kaunas to his own activism with Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, which Kaye/Kantrowitz helped lead.
The residency includes a day of public programs,…