Contraption

Cartoonist Rube Goldberg became a beloved humorist at the turn of the last century by drawing enormously complicated machines to accomplish wholly unnecessary jobs. Ned Kahn, who invents machines that make visible otherwise invisible natural phenomena, is among America’s greatest artists working today in public places. Amid these towering figures are a hundred years worth of California Jewish artists, including standouts such as acclaimed ceramicist Annabeth Rosen and gizmo matriarch Bella Feldman. These artists’ works — and fourteen others — gracefully render the world as a gigantic unexplained mechanism, complex, baffling, and lovely.