Hannah Altman, As It Were, Suspended in Midair
February 13, 2025 -June 12, 2025
Kniznick Gallery, 515 South Street, Waltham, MA
Gallery Hours: Monday-Thursday, 10 a.m. - 4 p.m.
Extended Sunday hours: April 27 and May 4, 11 a.m. - 4 p.m.
Hannah Altman, Hiding (Flying), 2023, Archival pigment print, 20 x 25 inches, Courtesy of the artist.
In As It Were, Suspended in Midair, Hannah Altman’s photographs examine how Jewish myths are shared, inherited, and reshaped across the diaspora. Altman draws from Yiddish literature and Jewish mystical texts as she situates her female protagonists in lush landscapes and fraught interiors. Animated by sunlight, their postures, gestures, environments, and ritual objects foreshadow abundance and danger. Their mere presence threatens dominant narratives grounded in patriarchal tradition.
Still lifes interject like incantations, offering suspense and new possibilities: a corner knee-deep in salt, a hand mirror submerged in a jar, an open-palmed Baba Yaga puppet – a witch from Slavic folklore who feasted on children. Altman juxtaposes a person’s back with five thick nails puncturing their white garment and a stretched klaf – parchment paper produced from a tanned and kosherized animal inscribed with biblical passages to fit inside a mezuzah. Layering symbols and allusions, Altman builds a world that recasts and transforms Jewish ritual and folklore toward the world ahead.
THE TICKET Things to do around Boston this weekend and beyond, February 12, 2025, Boston Globe
"As It Were, Suspended In Midair emerges as a dynamic, speculative reworking of tradition, resonating across generations and landscapes". —Kaitlyn Ovett Clark, January 2025, Boston Art Review
What Will You Remember? By Suzanne Révy
HANNAH ALTMAN is a Jewish-American artist from New Jersey and based in Boston. She holds an MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University. Her photographs portray lineage, folklore, memory, and narrative.
Her work has been exhibited at Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art, Silver Eye Center for Photography, Ogden Museum of Southern Art, Filter Photo, Technical Collections Dresden Museum, Blue Sky Gallery, Candela Gallery, and the Griffin Museum of Photography, among others. Publications where her work has appeared includes the New York Times, Artforum, Vanity Fair, PHMuseum, Carnegie Museum of Art Storyboard, Lensculture, Booooooom, and British Journal of Photography. She was included in the 2021 Silver List, a 2022 Hopper Prize finalist, the 2022 Portraits Hellerau Photography Award First Prize Winner, a 2023 Innovate Grant Recipient, and a 2023 Aperture Portfolio Prize Finalist. She became the inaugural Blanksteen Artist in Residence at the Slifka Center for Jewish Life at Yale in 2022.
Her first photobook Kavana (2020, Kris Graves Projects) is housed in permanent collections including the MoMa Library and the Metropolitan Museum of Art Thomas J Watson Library. Her new monograph, We Will Return to You (2025) is published by Saint Lucy Books.
Hannah Altman, Telling You, 2021, Archival pigment print, 24 x 30 inches, Courtesy of the artist
Project Statement
Rooted in the depths of Yiddish literature and Jewish texts, this project considers how storytelling is translated and transformed through photographs by evoking the enigmatic, ritualistic, and multi-layered world of folklore.
From mouth to ear to pen to performance, Jewish myths evolve across the diaspora, braiding themselves into both past and future, echoing their origins and never entirely replicating. The photographs tell tales of cycles, looming tension, unsettled environments, and open-ended truths punctuated by ritual and iconography. With a distinct focus on sun-soaked gestures, objects, and anxieties, the photographs sprawl between the referential and the fictitious to form a visual language that stretches and shifts across lands, generations, and the stories that give it meaning.
Within the world of these images, the act of questioning transforms into an inventive ritual. The elaboration of allegories become inherited heirlooms for speculative futures. Through a photographic framework that examines how Jewish narratives are shared, inherited, and reshaped with each retelling, this project cultivates an environment sown from a turbulent past and reaches outward toward the rumbling world to come.
-Hannah Altman
As It Were, Suspended in Midair is presented by the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute in the Kniznick Gallery (515 South Street, Waltham, MA 02453).
Exhibition Programs
Cross-Campus Tour: Hannah Altman and Leonora Carrington
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Presented in collaboration with the Rose Art Museum |Kniznick Gallery, 515 South Street, Waltham, MA
Rose Art Museum, 415 South Street, Waltham, MA
Join us for an inspiring afternoon of art and discovery across Brandeis University! Start at the Kniznick Gallery with an artist-guided tour of Hannah Altman's As It Were, Suspended in Midair. Drawing from Yiddish literature and Jewish mystical texts, Altman’s evocative photographs situate her female protagonists in lush landscapes and charged interiors, where sunlit gestures and ritual objects foreshadow both abundance and danger.
From there, we’ll walk together to the Rose Art Museum to explore Leonora Carrington: Dream Weaver. Featuring over thirty works spanning six decades, Carrington’s visionary compositions—rooted in biography, folklore, mysticism, myth, and the occult—invite us into multidimensional worlds that seek to unravel life’s deepest mysteries.
Artist Talk and Book Launch
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Kniznick Gallery and the Liberman-Miller Lecture Hall, Brandeis University, 515 South Street, Waltham, MA
Join Hannah Altman for an artist talk and book launch celebrating her solo exhibition in the Kniznick Gallery, As It Were, Suspended in Midair, presented by the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute, and the March 2025 release of her book, We Will Return to You (Saint Lucy Books). Altman will be joined in conversation by photographer and scholar Mark Alice Durant, Publisher and Editor of Saint Lucy Books.
Photographer Hannah Altman’s new book, We Will Return To You, considers how Jewish storytelling is translated and transformed through photographs by evoking the enigmatic, ritualistic, and multi-layered world of folklore. The 71 color photographs in the book, often portraits, are illuminated by Altman’s distinctive use of natural light.
An excerpt from the book forms the foundation of Altman's exhibition, As It Were, Suspended in Midair, presented by the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute in the Kniznick Gallery at Brandeis University, running February 13–June 12, 2025. Layering symbols and allusions, Altman builds a world that recasts and transforms Jewish ritual and folklore toward the world ahead.
A book signing and reception will follow the artist talk and conversation.
Mark Alice Durant is the author of Summer of the White Fox, and After, Maya Deren, Choreographed for Camera, and 27 Contexts: An Anecdotal History in Photography. His essays have appeared in numerous journals such as Aperture, Art in America, Photograph Magazine, Dear Dave, and many catalogs, monographs, and anthologies including Rania Matar: She, Seeing Science: How Photography Reveals the Universe, and Vik Muniz Seeing is Believing. He has taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, UCLA, University of New Mexico, the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College, and is currently a professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Durant is publisher / editor of Saint Lucy Books.
Through Multiple Lenses, A Passover Inspired Art Conversation: Reimagining Hidden Narratives with Photographer Hannah Altman and Storyteller Miriam Anzovin
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VISIT the HBI BLOG FOR PHOTOS AND REFLECTIONS
Moderated by Maia Lefferman, Brandeis ‘25
In the spirit of Passover and the contemporary retelling of Jewish stories, join photographer Hannah Altman and online storytelling sensation Miriam Anzovin in conversation, as they share their processes of harnessing the power of narrative using their unique voices. Anzovin will use Altman’s photographs as Jewish “text” to encounter as she guides us on a tour of some images in the exhibit highlighting lesser known female stories she finds within. Bring some new ideas to your seder!
Cosponsored by Brandeis Hillel, JFAB: Jewish Feminist Association of Brandeis, Combined Jewish Philanthropies, and the Jewish Arts Collaborative.
About Hannah Altman
Hannah Altman is a Jewish-American artist from New Jersey and based in Boston. She holds an MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University. Her photographs portray lineage, folklore, memory, and narrative.
Her work has been exhibited at Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art, Silver Eye Center for Photography, Ogden Museum of Southern Art, Filter Photo, Technical Collections Dresden Museum, Blue Sky Gallery, Candela Gallery, and the Griffin Museum of Photography, among others. Publications where her work has appeared includes the New York Times, Artforum, Vanity Fair, PHMuseum, Carnegie Museum of Art Storyboard, Lensculture, Booooooom, and British Journal of Photography. She was included in the 2021 Silver List, a 2022 Hopper Prize finalist, the 2022 Portraits Hellerau Photography Award First Prize Winner, a 2023 Innovate Grant Recipient, and a 2023 Aperture Portfolio Prize Finalist. She became the inaugural Blanksteen Artist in Residence at the Slifka Center for Jewish Life at Yale in 2022.
Her first photobook Kavana (2020, Kris Graves Projects) is housed in permanent collections including the MoMa Library and the Metropolitan Museum of Art Thomas J Watson Library. Her new monograph, We Will Return to You (2025) is published by Saint Lucy Books.
About Miriam Anzovin
Miriam Anzovin is a huge Jewish nerd, storyteller, and artist, putting ancient discourse in direct communication with modern internet culture, pop culture, and current events. She is the creator of the #DafReactions Project, #JewishLore Reactions and other funny and heartfelt social media content with Jewish themes and ideas.
In The Daf Reactions Project, she shares her practice of daily study of the Babylonian Talmud in the Daf Yomi cycle from the viewpoint of a formerly Orthodox, now secular, Millennial feminist. In Jewish Lore Reactions, she explores her favorite epic characters and stories from the incredible, extended chain of imagination that is the collective narrative world-building of the Jewish people. Her videos are her authentic reactions, with commentary both heartfelt and comedic, centering Jewish joy; and Miriam invites others to walk beside her on this journey and connect with Jewish teachings in ways that are relatable and personally meaningful to them.
Miriam was the first Artist in Residence at Moishe House, and was previously the host of The Vibe of the Tribe podcast. She is currently represented for speaking engagements by Jewish Speakers Bureau and is a 2024-25 fellow of CJP and JArts’ Community Creative Fellowship. She exists at the intersection of Sefaria and Sephora. And, also in some people’s minds, where she lives rent free.
About Maia Lefferman
Born in Philadelphia and raised in Phoenix and Los Angeles, Maia Lefferman is a senior at Brandeis University triple majoring in art history, politics and women's, gender and sexuality studies (WGS). She is the Louise Weinberg Arts Intern at the Women’s Studies Research Center, where she supports and mounts feminist exhibitions in the Kniznick Gallery. Last year, while studying art history in London she worked as a gallery assistant at Bernard Jacobson Gallery. On campus, Lefferman is a student docent at the Rose Art Museum, an Undergraduate Department Representative for WGS, and a student voting organizer. In her free time, you can find Lefferman singing with her a cappella group, visiting museums, farming, and crafting.