The CJM Blog

Every city has its history, which is easy to ignore when you live there. Cultural pilgrimages often end when the urban honeymoon is over, and you complete the transformation from starry-eyed visitor to jaded inhabitant. But there are stories everywhere, and few stories are as good as those from the Beat Generation, which came of age and influence in 1950s San Francisco.

A "before" image from SFMOMA's Instagram of their rooftop sculpture garden and cafe, and below a video documenting how the sculpture Zim Zum I was moved from this location to the CJM. The worst kept secret here at the Contemporary Jewish Museum (CJM) is that before they closed for renovation, a lot of us loved to have coffee and meetings in the rooftop sculpture garden of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA).

Ezra Jack Keats, "After breakfast he put on his snowsuit and ran outside." 1962. On February 21, 2013 the Contemporary Jewish Museum hosted the awards ceremony for the Ezra Jack Keats bookmaking competition. An annual New York City school tradition for over 25 years, this was the first time the event was ever held on the West Coast, owing to our hosting of the exhibition The Snowy Day and the Art of Ezra Jack Keats . The schools of snow-free Northern California are no strangers to  The Snowy Day , published in 1962 and the  first modern full-color picture book to feature an African American protagonist. Students from San Francisco Public Schools and Bay Area Jewish Day Schools were invited to participate, and o ver 50 entries from 19 schools were entered into the competition. So how was the New York spirit and playful sensitivity Keats was known for interpreted by Bay Area students? Here are some of the winners: