Jewish Museum Postcard: Making Itself by Talia Levitt

Featured on this postcard is a wall mural by Brooklyn artist Talia Levitt created for the Jewish Musuem's fourth floor exhibition space and salon.

About the work:

Talia Levitt is a third-generation Jewish Brooklynite with family roots in the garment industry, and her paintings often mimic the patterns and textured surfaces of textiles. Levitt created the layered mural in response to the Museum and its site. Flanked by sweeping views of Central Park, the tiered shelf is filled with objects inspired by the Jewish Museum collection, from a nineteenth-century Persian wedding dress to a colonial American coffeepot. Its floral backdrop is borrowed from a seventeenth century Italian Torah binder, a textile used to wrap the Torah scroll when it is not in use. The animals that border the shelf are from a cut-paper mizrah—a plaque that that indicates the direction of prayer—made in Ukraine, while the pattern of a Bukharan (Central Asian) skullcap, or kippah, decorates the sleeping baby’s clothing.

The artist’s daughter, born while the mural was being conceived and produced, appears at lower left, while the three adult figures are a splintered self-portrait. Like many new parents, particularly mothers, Levitt’s very essence seems pulled in different directions, a counterpoint to the dense interweaving of images and experiences in the mural. The invocation of family life is also appropriate to the Museum's building, which was home to the Warburg family (including five children) from 1908 through the 1930s and is now a site of creation for artists, young and old.

Talia Levitt
Born in 1989, Brooklyn
Making Itself, 2025
Acrylic paint on canvas Courtesy of the artist

Paper
4"x9"