It’s All Relative was designed on the occasion of the exhibition Gillian Laub: Family Matters and in collaboration with Gillian Laub, The Contemporary Jewish Museum, Reboot, and Silver Screen Studios.
Share your family stories with us! Gillian Laub: Family Matters offers a vulnerable window into the artist’s family during times of joy, rupture, and repair, resulting in moments of deep self-reflection. By sharing her point of view, Laub also invites us to reflect on our own relationships with our loved ones. Located in The CJM’s Yud Gallery, It’s All Relative is presented in conjunction with Gillian Laub: Family Matters. This space offers a moment to pause and reflect on stories about your family, whether biological or chosen, and how those relationships have shaped you.
Once you have visited the exhibition, we invite you to respond to two prompts inspired by Family Matters. Record your response at recording booths in the Yud Gallery or respond in your own time by emailing a short video (maximum length two minutes) to curatorial@thecjm.org or using #FamilyMattersProject and tagging @jewseum on Instagram or Twitter. Select submissions will be featured at The Museum! Come back each month to watch new visitor responses.
Rituals reconnected Gillian’s family. Share a family tradition that is meaningful to you or that you wish to create.
When reflecting on your own family dynamics, which elements of this exhibition impacted you and why?
It’s All Relative was designed on the occasion of the exhibition Gillian Laub: Family Matters and in collaboration with Gillian Laub, The Contemporary Jewish Museum, Reboot, and Silver Screen Studios.
For the last two decades, American photographer Gillian Laub has used the camera to investigate how society’s most complex questions are often writ large in our most intimate relationships. Throughout her career she has been simultaneously, and privately, documenting the emotional, psychological, and political landscape of her own family—exploring her growing discomfort with the many extravagances that marked their lives. Intense intergenerational bonds have shaped and nurtured Laub, but have also been fraught. Balancing empathy with critical perspective, humor with horror, the closeness of family with the distance of the artist, Gillian Laub: Family Matters offers a picture of an American family saga that feels both anguished and hopeful.
Gillian Laub: Family Matters is organized by the International Center of Photography, New York, and has been made possible through the generous support of Marina and Andrew Lewin, Benrubi Gallery, and, in part, by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Gililan Laub, Chappaqua backyard, 2000. © Gillian Laub