Pauline Adamek
Last weeks to catch Away in the Catskills: Summers, Sour Cream and Dirty Dancing, a personal recollection and recollection of past memories now on view at the Skirball Cultural Center until August 31, 2025.
Away in the Catskills: Summers, Sour Cream and Dirty Dancing is an intimate and personal exhibition in which contemporary artist Marissa J Futernick reflects on the lives of her family members who vacationed to the Catskill region. The resulting collection forms a careful look at her own family during the mid 20th century, as well as giving insight into how Jewish Americans experienced life and culture.
First generation immigrants enjoyed many of the pleasures that the American middle class life afforded. They danced the Watusi, listened to Frank Lyman records and took summer family vacations kibitzing in Yiddish around the pool. But in the post war years, many American leisure destinations kept their doors closed to Jews, which is why the Catskills became a mecca for Jewish American families, and a haven for various other marginalized communities as well. The simultaneous sense of welcome and exclusion, of opportunity and obstacles and even of enjoyment and hardship, and the ability to embrace these things is a common thread within the Jewish American experience.
Jewish families experienced a safe and welcoming place to enjoy time together. LA-based artist Marisa J. Futernick looks into her mother’s and grandmother’s summer vacations in this playful, loving, and meditative body of contemporary artworks, provoking questions about leisure, loss, and what it means to live in diaspora.
About the Exhibition
This contemporary art exhibition explores inherited and imagined memories of Jewish resorts in New York’s Catskill Mountains at mid-century (1945–1968). LA-based artist Marisa J. Futernick looks deeply into her mother’s and grandmother’s summer vacations in this by turns playful, loving, and meditative body of work, which provokes questions about leisure, loss, and what it means to live in diaspora.
Colloquially known as the “Borscht Belt,” this region catered to working- and middle-class American Jewish families who, along with other minority groups, were excluded from many leisure spaces. The Catskills offered vacationers a break from wage labor and some forms of domestic labor, as well as a safe and welcoming place to enjoy family time.
This exhibition features:
- A series of fifteen prints drawn from vintage color slides of the artist’s maternal family on vacation in the Catskills during the 1960s, capturing the pleasure and freedom that families like Futernick’s experienced in the Catskills.
- An installation created from the artist’s family mementos with an accompanying zine, using objects to connect to what leisure looked and felt like for Jewish vacationers.
- A new video artwork comprised of several hundred still photographs, with voiceover narration by the artist. In this video work, Futernick juxtaposes her mother’s and grandmother’s strong feelings of Jewish community—bolstered by their experiences in the Catskills—with her own relative lack thereof, provoking a conversation about assimilation and loss.
Skirball Cultural Center
2701 N. Sepulveda Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90049
(310) 440-4500
info@skirball.org
About the Skirball
The Skirball Cultural Center is a place of meeting guided by the Jewish tradition of welcoming the stranger and inspired by the American democratic ideals of freedom and equality. We welcome people of all communities and generations to participate in cultural experiences that celebrate discovery and hope, foster human connections, and call upon us to help build a more just society.
Visiting the Skirball
The Skirball is located at 2701 N. Sepulveda Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90049. Museum hours: Tuesday–Friday, 12:00–5:00 pm; Saturday–Sunday, 10:00 am–5:00 pm; closed Mondays and holidays. Reservations are recommended for General Admission and the permanent exhibition Noah’s Ark at the Skirball, which requires timed entry and is ticketed separately. For general information, the public may call (310) 440-4500 or visit skirball.org.
Terry Morgan