Hannah Altman: Not a Circle but a Spiral

Hannah Altman: Not a Circle but a Spiral
Sep 18, 2026 – Feb 7, 2027

United States United States — Art Museum
1109 5th Ave at 92nd St
New York, NY 10128

The Jewish Museum in New York presents Hannah Altman: Not a Circle but a Spiral, on view from 18 September 2026 through 7 February 2027, a focused installation that forms part of Artists Respond to Sacred Splendor: Jewish Ritual Art and Christian Treasures from St. Vitus Cathedral in Prague. The exhibition presents a selection of Altman's photographs—including several new works commissioned for this show—alongside Christian treasures from St. Vitus Cathedral and Jewish ceremonial art from the Jewish Museum's collection, expanding on what Altman describes as an "ongoing dialogue about inheritance, ritual, and reinvention."

Hannah Altman, born in 1995 in New Jersey and based in Boston, is a photographer whose work engages with myth, performance, and memory, often through the lens of Jewish ritual and folklore. Drawing on her background as a dancer, Altman thinks about the photograph as a stage. The building blocks of the scenes she constructs are, for the most part, ordinary—a chair, a mirror, a piece of fruit—but she uses them to conjure unexpectedly charged atmospheres. Inspired by Jewish spiritual practice, her photographs locate the holy within the everyday: spangles of light reflecting off the surface of water, or delicate blue veins faintly visible beneath the drum-taut skin of a pregnant belly.

In this installation, Altman works with specifically Jewish ceremonial objects, including a house-shaped tzedakah box (alms container) reminiscent of the architecturally inspired religious objects on view in Sacred Splendor on the museum's second floor. In Protection (Carrying), she references the eruv, a type of enclosure that offers a practical solution to the religious prohibition against carrying objects outside the home on the Sabbath by uniting discrete structures into a single symbolic domain. Like the prescribed movements of ritual, Altman's photographs transpose the specificity of the bodies, objects, and moments they depict into an eternal or universal register.

Altman's earlier work includes Kavana (2018-2020), a photography project exploring Jewish memory, narrative heirlooms, and image making, published as a photobook by Kris Graves Projects in 2020 and collected by the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Harvard University. In 2023, she became the inaugural Blanksteen Artist in Residence at the Slifka Center for Jewish Life at Yale and was named an Aperture Portfolio Prize finalist. Her second photography book, We Will Return to You, published by Saint Lucy Books in March 2025, explores motifs within Jewish folklore, particularly diasporic Yiddish literature.

The exhibition is located on Floor 3 within Identity, Culture, and Continuity: Stories from the Collection of the Jewish Museum, alongside Afruz Amighi: Sounding Shell, another focused contemporary installation. Two additional contemporary works by Edmund de Waal are on view in Sacred Splendor on Floor 2. The Jewish Museum, located at 1109 Fifth Avenue at 92nd Street, is under the auspices of The Jewish Theological Seminary.

Image: Hannah Altman, “Shofar (To Catch One's Breath),” 2024. Photo courtesy of the artist.


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