Marcia Bricker Halperin Lecture & Exhibit

An exhibit of photographs presenting the cafeterias that fed New Yorkers in the early to mid-20^th Century will be featured in the Institute for Research on Women and Gender’s gallery in Lane Hall during the 2020 Winter Semester. Marcia Bricker Halperin will kick off the exhibit of her photographs with a lecture titled “Kibitz & Nosh: NYC’s Vanished Cafeterias” at the Frankel Center on January 16, 1:00 pm, followed by a reception at the Lane Hall gallery at 4:00 pm.

As a young art student, Halperin found that cafeterias gave her a window into the lives of people she wouldn’t usually come across in her everyday life. “One February day, while photographing reflections in store windows, my fingers froze solid onto my Honeywell Pentax camera,” noted Halperin. “That's when I headed through the revolving doors into Dubrow's Cafeteria. I took a ticket from the man at the door and found myself looking out at a tableau of amazing faces. There was light, reflections, patterns, textures, sweeping architectural features and remarkable subjects all for the price of a cup of coffee, then 25 cents.”

Her lecture will focus on the part cafeterias played in 20^th century Jewish American history and in assimilating Jewish culture into the mainstream and vice versa. Cafeterias like Dubrow’s served popular Jewish style dishes, like blintzes, as well as less traditional dishes, like shrimp salad. “It became a place to experience the world outside of what you would have at home,” stated Halperin. “I look forward to having people learn about the golden era of cafeterias, a time when self-serve restaurants were in every city and contributed to vibrant civic life.”

She first discovered her passion for photography while studying art at Brooklyn College. “The subtlety of tone in photography just touched me. It appeals as an art to me. To control tones and light, when I get it to the process of developing, it hooked me.”

After graduating with a Master of Fine Arts from Brooklyn College, she was selected to be a part of the CETA Artists Project.  CETA was a federally funded employment program for artists that operated in New York City from 1978 to 1980. The program connected unemployed artists with community sponsors to develop public artworks, give performances, and teach classes. One of her projects was working with tenant organizers at Housing Conservation Coordinators. She documented the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood of Manhattan, taking pictures of apartments that were neglected by landlords to help the tenants win lawsuits and advocate for homesteaders.

After the CETA project ended, she worked for the New York City Department of Education, teaching art and special education for over 35 years. Since her retirement from teaching, she has been revisiting her early work, which inspired her to approach future work with a fresh lens. “There was a drive to be creative and do things that is kind of hard to recreate. I think I’m striving towards to try to do that again. I’m trying to inspire myself through my past work.”

She is currently working on a documentation project of Hasidim celebrating Jewish holidays at Coney Island that originally started in 1981. She remarked that between archiving her photos from the 1970s and 80s, and her current documentation work she can see a thread that connects her work from the very beginning to now. “I have found that over the years that photography is my way to understand my place in the Jewish community.”