Say the name Hannah Arendt and everyone sits up straighter. The political theorist and philosopher was born to a Jewish family in Germany, in 1906. She was educated there, and then forced to leave in 1933 because of rising antisemitism. She was brilliant and brave, and in the 1930s worked to save fellow Jews from the Nazis. She escaped an internment camp in France, and in 1941, with her second husband and her mother, secured passage to New York, where she went on to intellectual stardom, writing books that included The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) and Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963). For the entire year of 2021, Richard Saltoun plans eight art exhibitions based on the essays that make up Arendt’s collection Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought, written from 1954 to 1968. The first exhibition is “The Modern Age,” which explores themes of statelessness and alienation. —L.J.