Misc Projects and Past Works
RUTH BADER GINSBURG
For over a decade, Jac Lahav has painted Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Beginning in his 48 Jews series (2008 - Present) Lahav has been thinking about the strength and resilience RBG embodies as an icon and a leader.
Lahav’s relationship with RBG goes back even earlier when Lahav’s mother was friends with the woman early in their legal careers. Lahav’s mother is a feminist icon herself, a pioneer in constitutional law, and one of the first female law professors at Boston University. Being raised by such a strong woman has filtered into Lahav’s painting and curatorial work. Since they first painted RBG, Ginsburg has grown into a full-blown cultural icon.
Here are a few of the RBG paintings Lahav has completed over the years.
Legend, 10” x 12”, Gouache, Flashe, Acrylic, 24k Gold Leaf on panel, 2020
Ruth Bader Ginsburg Print : Collection Jewish Museum Milwaukee
JUSTICE 4 ALL
(RBG Portrait Painting, Oil on Canvas, 48” x 72”, 2019)
WORKS ON VELVET
Velvet RBG, 24” x 32” (each) - Printed Velvet and Acrylic, 2020
PRINTS AVAILABLE : Contact for Prices
Left Image: RBG succulent (Collection Mount Holyoke Art Museum)
Right Image: RBG Mistletoe (Private Collection)
These two small paintings are gouache and flashe on panel.
Both exhibited at the SpringBreak Art Show 2020 (Private Collection)
Above: renditions of Ruth Bader Ginsburg painted for the Lahav’s 48 Jews series. The most recent Ruth is in red on the right.
Above: Not quite a diptych, these works are part of the Great Americans series and feed off each other. Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the left and Sandra Day O’Connor on the right, both standing on angular montages of Raphael’s Justice and both have elements of painter’s pallets emblazoned on their shirts.
It is interesting that O’Connor was the first woman on the Supreme Court, yet RBG has become the renown feminist icon. Furthermore, O’Connor had to leave her position on the supreme court early to take care of her ailing husband. He passed away a year after she left her position. How would we view her legacy if she had remained?
RBG FACTS : Fashion Icon, Feminist Superhero, and Inspiration. Young RBG went to Cornell University and married Martin D. Ginsburg, becoming a mother before starting law school at Harvard, where she was one of the few women in her class. Ginsburg went to Columbia Law School, where she graduated first in her class. RBG’s husband was Martin D. Ginsburg, an American lawyer who specialized in tax law. Ruth Bader Ginsburg died September 18, 2020, at the age of 87. Ginsburgs cause of death was complications due to metastatic pancreatic cancer.
"Real change, enduring change, happens one step at a time." - RBG quote
WASHINGTON
Jac Lahav’s recent series is a group of Washington portraits. Using Gilbert Stuarts famous Athenaeum painting as a jumping off point. Lahav deconstructs ideas of icons, representation and the history of contemporary portraiture in the age of the internet. These paintings display a humor and wit that frequents Lahav’s other series while continuing to ask bigger questions like “how can we celebrate historical figures AND critique them at the same time.”
Lahav lost his father at a young age which is why the idea of “founding fathers” became an interesting entry point into this work. Now a young father himself, Lahav is re-examining what it means to be a parent. “When we are children, we see our parents either as infallible heroes or as evil tyrants. As we grow up our parents become more nuanced, complicated, and so very human.” Lahav thinks we can use this personal lens to decipher one of the most pressing questions facing us today, namely how to celebrate yet critique the pillars of our national history.
Note: In these works Ruth Bader Ginsburg makes repeated appearances. Lahav thinks of RBG as a fascinating contrast to George Washington. She is the contemporary feminist icon and a pivotal counterpoint to Washington as another the old white man in history.
LOS CAPUGCHOS
A series of over 60 pug related drawing inspired by Francisco Goya’s Los Caprichos. Lahav’s series Los Capugchos examines a world of capricious excess, where artists pretend to be instagram celebrities and true instagram celebrities are pugs with over 2 million followers.
DEVILS REVISITED
Over 50 pen and ink drawings exploring the food culture of NYC. These are the places Lahav frequented during his 15 years in the city, creating a bastardization of the traditional food blog or a 'demonic yelp'. A limited-edition printing of 100 copies of these drawings was sold in 2016.
PUG PAINTINGS 2016
Lahav obsessed with the strange cuteness of pugs. He has two pugs at home, Momo and Beeper. In 2016 Lahav became fascinated by the 'pug internet', a collection of websites and social media exclusively about pugs. In 2015 he created an instagram account for Momo, his pug, who now has over 30k followers (@momopug2000). The fantastic/bizarre elements of instagram dogs as a medium for proxy representation necessitated deeper exploration of the pug-net. In 2016, Lahav and Momo created a pug website at www.pugcity.org (a pug content aggregate site, including interviews with Momo's instagram pug friends) and published a Pug Jokebook (Available on Amazon HERE )
Below are some paintings which came out of this journey.
CHRONICLE
CHRONICLE (2012–2017) is a grouping of over 28 oil paintings, 32" x 24" each re-telling the narratives of famous slaves throughout world history. This work was first exhibited at the Saginaw Art Museum, Michigan in 2018.
(Below is an excerpt from an essay by Daniel Belasco)
"Chronicle is a series of 28 oil paintings, each 32 x 24 inches, that depict varied historical and contemporary individuals who fall into the category of “slaves” because they all had lived as a slave for a period in their lives. Like in their previous portrait series 48 Jews (2007–Present) and Great Americans (2008–Present), Lahav delves into fraught symbolic territory. In each series, Lahav employs portraiture to question basic assumptions about the relationship of historical memory and collective identity. Lahav takes the viewer on an impolite journey from ignorance to awareness, aggressively pushing an engagement with stereotypes and values. Lahav’s portraits can be visually beautiful but jarringly “wrong” representations with intense swaths of color and irreverent compositions that often overwhelm our ability to read the likeness. For Lahav, familiar representations become “oscillations” between the known and unknown, the personal and the political, the abstract and the representational. The viewer goes along for the ride."
