Artists and Immigrants

The year 2021 marked the centennial of the immigration of artist Chaim Gross and his wife, Renee (Nechin) Gross. The two came to the United States under very different circumstances. Accompanied by one of his brothers and leaving the rest of his family behind, Chaim traveled from Eastern Europe to New York as a teenager after surviving the horrors of World War I. Renee, in contrast, emigrated with her mother and other family members at age eleven, joining her father who was already living in the U.S. Despite these differences, both Chaim and Renee settled in New York City, where they met, married, raised their children, and later established the Renee & Chaim Gross Foundation.

Artists and Immigrants celebrates this milestone year and the many immigrant artists who studied, worked, and interacted with Chaim Gross. Based on the shared experience of immigration, Gross formed lasting relationships with these artists and collected their work—the origins of the Foundation’s collection. The exhibition explores the importance of six collective themes in immigrant artists’ lives and work: their personal histories; thriving communities in neighborhoods such as Greenwich Village and the Lower East Side; arts education; leisure and travel; the rise of Social Realism and New Deal art projects during the Great Depression; and the destruction, displacement, and devastation wrought by World War II.

Spanning eight decades, Artists and Immigrants includes nearly 100 works by more than 50 immigrant artists, as well as materials from the Foundation’s archives. Drawn from the Grosses’ personal collection, the exhibition and catalogue are not comprehensive studies of twentieth-century immigration to the United States. However, the artists featured in this exhibition experienced these policies firsthand.

Exhibition curated by

Sasha Davis, Executive Director

Brittany Cassandra, Collections and Programs Manager

Clare Richfield, 2021-22 NYU Public Humanities Predoctoral Fellow

This exhibition is accomapanied by the catalogue Artists and Immigrants. The publication is made posssible by a generous grant from the Robert David Lion Gardiner Foundation of New York.

Artists and Immigrants is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.