Modern-ish and Yonia Fain’s Yiddishland

On September 13, 2023, an exhibition called Modern-ish: Yonia Fain and the Art History of Yiddishland by the contemporary artist Yevgeniy Fiks opened at CUNY’s James Gallery, as a part of his project Yiddishland Museum of Modern Art.

Yonia Fain (1913-2013) was a renowned modernist artist and a Yiddish poet, author of 5 poetry books published in that language. During his life he travelled across the entire globe: from Ukraine and Lithuania to Japan, China and Mexico. Fiks told our website that his neologism “Modern-ish” refers to the special modernist tradition of Yiddishland, the global space of Yiddish culture, which does not quite fit into the canons of modernism. Representatives of this tradition often have multiple hyphenated identities: for example, one may be Lithuanian-Jewish-American.

We have already written on our website about Yevgeniy Fiks and his concept of Yiddish as a “cosmic” language, a cultural bridge capable of uniting traditional ethnicity with the principle of universalism, the local with the cosmopolitan and cosmic. In 2022, the Yiddishland pavilion, organized by Fiks, opened at the Venice Biennale. The current exhibition at CUNY will be open until December 9.