Contemporary Jewish Museum Curator Renny Pritikin, an Alum, on a Buzz Mission

SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE -- Now, a decade after leaving Yerba Buena, Pritikin is back on Mission Street near Third at the Contemporary Jewish Museum, where he’s the new chief curator. He believed in political change as a young 1960s activist. “I was looking for a way to be in the world that would feel like I wasn’t exploiting anyone and was contributing to the movement of society forward,” says Pritikin, a published poet who went to the New School in New York City and then he moved here to go to graduate school in creative writing at SF State. Instead, he chose the University’s innovative interdisciplinary arts department, where he studied with artist Jock Reynolds, now director of Yale’s museum. Pritikin met his wife, Judy Moran, in the SF State program and co-directed New Langton Arts with her for many years until he went to Yerba Buena and she became a longtime project manager at the San Francisco Arts Commission.