Dear Rabbi

A Hug From The Art World presents Joel Mesler's Dear Rabbi. Following his mother’s passing in 2010, Mesler retrieved the Rabbi paintings that had once adorned his childhood home and brought them into his own family home. As Mesler, being a collector himself, was often present in auction rooms and online sales, he began to notice that Rabbi paintings from his era rarely attracted bids or buyers. Essentially, he thought to himself, what happens to these Rabbi paintings when they go unsold? Knowing Judaica is a verb and needs to be a lived experience, Mesler began to purchase these non-desired Rabbi paintings at a ferocious pace. After several years of buying these unwanted Rabbi paintings, he realized he had amassed hundreds of them. Also realizing he was a painter himself, he wanted to try his hand at painting and replicating some of these unwanted Rabbi’s. One fateful day, the art dealer John Cheim came knocking at his studio door and proposed an exhibition to Mesler. Joel said, “no one in their right mind would give their hard-earned shekels for one of my rabbis, much less put it on their wall.” John said, “it doesn’t matter, I have a calling from a higher power. These are important paintings and they need to be shown.” With that, they mounted an exhibition, The Rabbis, at Cheim & Read in 2023 and sold the lot to Jews and non-Jews alike. For the first time in his career, the artist was called to a higher power. He had purpose, he had inadvertently performed a mitzvah. He got Judaica back onto the walls of Madison Avenue and into the contemporary artistic consciousness for a new generation. In every subsequent endeavor, whether it be publishing, painting, printmaking, drawing, or sculpting, Mesler been dedicated to making space for the rabbi as an integral part of his practice. In Dear Rabbi, Mesler presents around a dozen of his own rabbi paintings interspersed with those from his private collection. The exhibition is a Where’s Waldo, or rather Where’s Yankel, of Mesler’s rabbi paintings, if you like. Upstairs, a suite of uniquely hand-colored lithographs hang on the gallery’s long brick wall. Their richly textured hair and colorful beards recall Gustav Klimt’s Portrait of Adele Bloch Bauer hanging in the Neue Galerie or the ornate cloak worn by Herma, the subject of his 1907 portrait, Hope II on view at the Museum of Modern Art. Born in 1974 in Los Angeles, CA, Joel Mesler earned his MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1999. His paintings shed light on universal themes by filtering them through autobiography, humor, self-deprecation, and surprising compositional juxtapositions. Miles of Smiles, his solo exhibition at Guild Hall in East Hampton, NY, is currently on view through October 2025. He is also presently included in the Philadelphia Museum’s group show, Brand X Editions: Innovation in Screenprinting, until November 16th, 2025. Mesler has previously been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Nassima Landau Art Foundation, Tel Aviv, Israel (2025); Rockefeller Center, New York (2024); Lévy Gorvy Dayan, New York (2024); Chateau La Coste, Provence, France (2024); Cheim & Read, New York (2023); Long Museum, Shanghai (2023); Flag Art Foundation, New York (2023); David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles (2023); LGDR London, Palm Beach (2022); Lévy Gorvy, Hong Kong (2021); Harper’s Books, East Hampton, New York (2020); A Hug From The Art World, New York (2019) and Simon Lee, London (2018). He lives and works in East Hampton, New York.

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