During my time at the Jewish Museum, I was particularly fascinated with Rachel Feinstein’s gallery. Her artwork reflects her daring personality, creativity, and feminist ideals. One artwork that really caught my eyes from her exhibition was a statue called Mr. Time. Like many of her other sculptures, Mr. Time is a representation of life, imperfections, and women empowerment.


Mr. Time was made in 2015 and Rachel Feinstein created this sculpture with powder-coated aluminum, vinyl, and a working clock. She drew inspiration from her son, Francis Currin, who made it when he was ten years old. This artwork was also not the original piece. It went through a transformation from a small pencil drawing to a human-scale, three-dimensional metal object.

At first glance, I thought that Feinstein was trying to illustrate this ambiguous concept of time with this statue. Since time was a concept created by human beings, Rachel Feinstein needed to use human-like or human-made objects to represent time. Thus, I believe the clock was used as the head of the statue because both time and the clock to measure time were both invented by humans. But being a feminist, Feinstein using a masculine figure to identify time captivated me. I wondered why is time a male and why is time in the form of a human. Walking around the exhibit, I saw the other artworks from Feinstein and a brief synopsis about her on the wall. I slowly began to understand Rachel Feinstein’s meaning in her abstract artwork. The statue not only had a clock as the head, but its whole body had guns, knives, swords, and letters with hearts all over. The way I see it, Feinstein is trying to define toxic masculinity through time. Time in this artwork would be history. Hence, throughout history, men only knew violence during the time of swords and knives, and later on when guns were invented. The love letters are probably what males thought would be something they would receive in return for exemplifying their masculinity through war and chaos. Or it could be love letters to the family of those males who died from conflicts involving those knives and guns. I believe both meanings involve some sort of conflict or bloodshed because violence has always been part of human history.

Feinstein probably wanted to suggest that toxic masculinity has led to nothing but the destruction of either females, family, or even all human beings. What appeared like a child’s drawing animated into a symbol for feminism and anti-violence. One could say it could be a sign of the anti-gun movement. For any of these reasons, the abstract concept of time would always be there. And it will illustrate how some things never change no matter how much time has passed.