Pomegranate Tree, Courtesy of Andrea Meislin Gallery, N.Y.The National Museum of American Jewish History will usher in Tu B’Shevat ( the Festival of Trees, Feb. 8), with an exhibition opening Wednesday, Feb. 1, featuring Israeli artist Tal Shochat’s stunning photographs of trees.

The exhibition features seven large format photographs of trees from Shochat’s In Praise of a Dream series and runs through April 22, Earth Day. As the Jewish holiday cycle turns to a celebration of nature with the holiday of Tu B’Shevat, which begins the evening of Feb. 7, Shochat’s photographs serve as a dramatic reminder of human responsibilities to the environments in which we live, according to Dr. Josh Perelman, the Museum’s chief curator and director of exhibitions and collections.

“ We are thrilled with this opportunity to exhibit a major new presence in the art world,” continued Dr. Perelman, “and to make possible for new and returning visitors to experience a variety of ways to explore and reflect on our American stories, be it through art or historical artifacts.”

The Israeli fruit trees in Shochat’s images are real and have been impeccably pruned and photographed against a black backdrop, rendering them disembodied from their natural surroundings. Each tree stands lush with fruit and in dream-like perfection. At the same time, they invoke questions of rootedness, about Jews’ millennial history as a Diaspora people and their relationships to the homelands in which they have chosen to settle.

Using a rigorous process, Shochat begins with scouring an area for a particular type of tree. Once she’s found her ideal specimen, she watches carefully and judges when the tree has reached the height of its maturity. Only then does she return with a black backdrop and, after carefully cleaning the branches and leaves, photographs the tree in this idealized and decontextualized setting. In this sense, each tree becomes the most perfect expression of itself and the entire collection is one that could never exist in nature. In the words of curator and art critic Ktzia Alon, it is a “hypnotizing, fiercely beautiful series.”

Beyond the garden scene of these works, Shochat’s series also speaks to the fundamental shift in values that has taken place over the last few years in relationship to the natural world. The Earth’s power has been exhausted by its privatization and the expropriation from the hands of the many for the benefit of the few. In Praise of a Dream preserves the power and the beauty of these trees and presents them to a larger audience through the installation in the Museum.

These trees serve as a reminder of ideals worth fighting for and they make a profound statement with a simple icon: the tree.

The exhibition inaugurates a new exhibitions program on the Museum’s concourse level and is part of an initiative to present new artifacts and exhibitions throughout the Museum that highlight aspects of the American Jewish experience for new and returning visitors, according to Ivy L. Barsky, the Museum’s Gwen Goodman director and COO.

Shochat’s prints were first exhibited in the Andrea Meislin Gallery in New York, which represents the artist. She is a noted photographer and teacher in Israel and has had solo shows at Rosenfeld Gallery, Tel Aviv, Herzliya Museum of Art and Haifa Museum of Art. Her work is in the Israel Museum, Jerusalem, and The Shpilman Institute of Photography, Tel Aviv.