By Miriam Silverberg

If you’ve ever been to a museum and seen something you wanted to take home with you, get to the Jewish Museum on Fifth and 92nd now!  They have a wonderful new exhibit called, Take Me (I’m Yours).

Visitors are asked to touch, participate in and even take home artworks.  Artworks will constantly evolve and be replenished.  Some of the things I took home were cans of water, magnets, buttons, safety pins.  They also had stacks of paper with ink and stamps “this is mine”, tee-shirts, Chinese fortune cookies.  The whole thing is such fun.  The exhibit features a group of 42 international and intergenerational artists working in a variety of media.

Also on view is John Singer Sargent’s bravura painting, Mrs. Carl Meyer and her Children.  This painting captures the world of a privileged Jewish family in late Victorian England.  Also on view are family photo albums, the guest register for the family’s country seat, caricatures by Max Beerbohm, Meyer’s seals and Sargent’s charcoal drawings.

The third and last exhibit is Memphis Does Hanukkah, featuring Peter Shire’s Menorah # 7.  Shire was an original member of the Milan-based Memphis design group, an international art collective founded around 1980.

Menorah # 7 is composed as a set of oddly shaped and balanced geometries, fabricated with industrial materials, bright colors.  It recalls the “Pop” culture, the Bauhaus and the irreverent style of West Coast art.

And since you can’t live on art alone, when you get hungry, there’s Russ and Daughters Appetizing cafe in the basement.

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Miriam Silverberg is a freelance journalist and owner of a boutique publicity agency in Manhattan, Miriam Silverberg Associates.  She may be reached at silverbergm@mindspring.com.