In Plain Sight

In Plain Sight:

Jewish Arts and Lives in the Muslim World

The Magnes – UC Berkeley

Ongoing – May 15, 2025

Gallery Hours:

Sunday, Tuesday, Wednesday 11am-4pm;

Thursday 11am-7pm

Admission is free.

Lately, do you feel the need to stop and take a breath? Everywhere I look, I find contentiousness surrounding me. So it warms my heart to see two museum curators from divergent focuses come together and spend five years creating an exhibition showing a past where people from different religions could live in harmony.

Nowinski, Karate Synagogue, Egypt ©1985

Notice the Jewish and Muslim symbols on the gate.

Following the rise of Islam in the 7th century CE, Jewish communities developed under Muslim empires from North India to Spain. They constituted the largest Jewish population in the world until the Modern Era, waning with the decline of the Ottoman empire in the 20th century. Their heritage – spanning centuries, regions, and languages – retains traces of the Muslim world even after subsequent migrations to Israel, Europe, the Americas, and Australia.

In Plain Sight draws a selection from over 1,400 objects in the Magnes’ permanent collection originating in Muslim lands, organized to reflect cultural affinities and common threads. The exhibition highlights rootedness in diaspora, shared graphic forms and visual landscapes, attitudes towards sacred texts and human bodies, and networks of trade and knowledge exchange, all centering around the fundamental role of light in Jewish and Muslim prayer spaces. The juxtaposition of objects creates further associations and narratives – through shapes, colors, materials, and techniques – that move across cultures and geographies.

L to R: Beaded lamp desk, topped with a six-pointed star and inscribed in Arabic with pious phrases and prayer texts; Lampshade inscribed in Hebrew and Arabic, and Prayer Shawl (Tallit) Bag decorated with six- and eight-pointed star motifs for a Bar Mitzvah. Also a case to hold a Qar'an manuscript. (Morocco, 1930-1950)

Methodology & Goals

The curators examined objects together, studied primary sources ranging from visual culture to architecture and music, and read secondary literature in several languages – at times flanked by UC Berkeley students and scholars in various disciplines. As they worked, they evaluated their complementary, divergent, and contradicting views. They trained themselves in the other’s perspective, seeing the same object with the other’s eyes, and forming, day after day, a shared perspective, a common sensibility. This exhibition speaks of human connections across divides, prompt reconsideration of assumptions that shape our public cultural and political debates, and map the precious possibilities (and inherent fragility) of coexistence, and mutual appreciation.

If only we all had the time and the temperament to do likewise, the world might improve. Here, what emerges in these objects is taking the familiar and making it unfamiliar and fresh, seeing what was unseen, and engaging viewers in a path of discovery in which the whole is much greater than the sum of its parts. Isn’t that what art is all about?

For more information, click here.