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Israel Museum at 50: Treasures and Exhibits
Aug 1, 2015 | Huffington Post
By Tom Teicholz
To Celebrate 50 Years, the Israel Museum Looks Back Much Further
Jun 17, 2015 | The New York Times
By Isabel Kershner
Israel Museum Partners Internationally for 50th Anniversary
May 27, 2015 | Art Info Blog
The Israel Museum Presents ‘A Brief History of Humankind’
May 1, 2015 | The Wall Street Journal
By Jessica Dawson
The world’s smallest Bible, now on view at the Israel Museum
Apr 27, 2015 | JTA
By Gabe Friedman
At 50, Israel Museum Looks to Local Artists
Apr 18, 2015 | Forward
By David Stromberg
The Israel Museum At 50
Mar 24, 2015 | The Jewish Week
By Nathan Jeffay
AT THE ISRAEL MUSEUM, THE MENU MIRRORS THE ART
Mar 26, 2015 | Tablet
By Dana Kessler

Israel Museum US press

Israel Museum at 50: Treasures and Exhibits

Aug 1, 2015 | Huffington Post

By Tom Teicholz

Happy birthday to the Israel Museum! The country's national museum turns 50 this year -- middle age for most of us, but quite young in museum years.
The museum is celebrating the occasion with a year of special exhibits, loans and gifts, adding to its encyclopedic collection covering Middle East archaeology, Jewish life, and modern and contemporary art.
The Israel Museum sits on a 20-acre campus in Jerusalem not far from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem's Givat Ram Campus, the Knesset and the Israel Supreme Court. Originally spearheaded by Jerusalem Mayor Teddy Kollek, the museum represents the consolidation of several earlier public and private collections, such as the Bezalel National Museum and important archaeological finds. It houses more than 500,000 objects, including the world-renowned Dead Sea Scrolls and a small-scale replica of Jerusalem during the time of the Second Temple, which have become a magnet for visitors.
When it opened in 1965, the museum was a campus of international-style pavilions designed by Alfred Mansfeld and Dora Gad, complemented by the outdoor Billy Rose Art Garden, designed by Isamu Noguchi. A separate edifice, the Shrine of the Book (which resembles something of an acorn or a Hershey's Kiss), was designed by Armand Bartos and Frederick Kiesler to house the Dead Sea Scrolls -- ancient religious texts purchased by Hungarian émigré David Samuel Gottesman and donated to the State of Israel.
In 1997, James Snyder, formerly of New York City's Museum of Modern Art, was appointed director, and 13 years later, the museum completed a $100 million campaign to refurbish the campus. The buildings dedicated to archaeology, fine arts, and Jewish art and life were rebuilt and connected by a new entrance pavilion by James Carpenter and are now the spine of the museum.
Whereas a visit to the museum seemed previously a somewhat haphazard affair, with one's interests being dragged in multiple directions, today it is a real pleasure -- well-organized, -appointed and -curated. Never has the museum looked so good.
The new entrance pavilion, a series of broad, rising platforms, is currently home to an installation by Zadok Ben-David called "Evolution and Theory." It runs the length of the pavilion on a bed of sand and consists of 250 hand-cut, razor-thin, life-size aluminum sculptures of the evolutionary stages of man and items inspired by scientific drawings in 19th-century encyclopedias, such as beakers, conical spheres and scales.
This leads to the central gallery and one of the museum's signature anniversary exhibits, "A Brief History of Humankind," which runs through Jan. 2, 2016, and is based in part on the best-selling book by renowned historian Yuval Harari. The museum has gathered 14 objects from its collection that highlight major advances in human civilization and surrounded them with contemporary artworks from around the world.
Just 14 objects, you say? But OMG, what objects!
Among them is the earliest evidence of man-made tools found in the land of Israel -- stones that were used in the Jordan Valley some 1.5 million years ago to create fire or used as a tool for digging and cutting. Not impressed? How about the oldest hearth in Eurasia -- from the north of Israel -- a campfire of burned flint with traces that animals were cooked there some 780,000 years ago -- the first evidence of cooking in Eurasia! There is also the oldest complete sickle in the world, the instrument that changed agriculture, which was found in a cave in northern Israel and dated at some 9,000 years old.
There are 60,000-year-old Neanderthal skulls and the skull of a Homo sapien some 85,000 years old. There are early examples of writing in which marks were made on clay tablets -- cuneiform -- and a fragment from the oldest extant copy of the Ten Commandments, dated to 30 B.C.E. and found among the Dead Sea Scrolls. There's more: a leaf from an original copy of the Gutenberg Bible -- on loan from the National Library of Israel -- and a handwritten page from Albert Einstein's manuscript on the special theory of relativity.
These objects tell the story of the progress of humankind -- the agrarian revolution, the cognitive revolution that brought about writing and communication, and the industrial revolution whose scientific discoveries ushered in the modern age.
The artworks that surround these objects range from Los Angeles artist Charles Ray's unsettling set of nude mannequins, "Family Romance" (1993), to film clips from Charlie Chaplin's "Modern Times" (1936). The cumulative effect of the show is to feel the breadth of mankind's progress and development. It is an exhibition that implicitly demonstrates the authority and the contemporary currency of the Israel Museum, as well as its value as a repository whose collection spans the sweep of civilization.
This golden anniversary is also occasion to revisit the Shrine of the Book, home to some of the greatest treasures of Jewish knowledge, tradition and culture. It is here you will find the Aleppo Codex, the very Torah that Maimonides, the Rambam himself, used in the 12th century. It is a profound experience to see a scroll that has such history and that connects all Jewish people throughout the centuries.. Likewise, how fascinating to be reminded of the various alternative gospels and texts that the Essenes produced, such as the battle of the Sons of Light against the Sons of Darkness, a phantasmagorical tale that speaks to a mystical, hallucinatory Jewish tradition that is far removed from today's normative practice and observance.
An adjacent exhibition hall contains the Nano Bible, the smallest Bible in the world, etched onto a gold-coated silicon chip the size of a grain of sugar (which can be magnified to confirm its accuracy). Created at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, the work's 1.2 million letters were written using a focused ion beam. The exhibition runs through Dec. 31, 2016, and is a modern marvel that complements the ancient writings nearby.
The Nano Bible is the size of a grain of sugar. Photo by Nitzan Zohar/Technion
The Israel Museum is also being celebrated with a number of anniversary gifts and loans, including a gorgeous Jeff Koons piece, "Sacred Heart." The immaculate stainless steel sculpture looks like a giant chocolate heart wrapped in shiny red foil and tied with a gold ribbon. (It's on loan from the collection of Steven and Alexandra Cohen of Greenwich, Conn.)
At 50, the Israel Museum is not showing its age, but rather its place as a world-class art and archaeology museum, whose anniversary deserves celebration -- or at least a visit.
This article originally appeared in print in The Jewish Journal of Los Angeles

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To Celebrate 50 Years, the Israel Museum Looks Back Much Further

Jun 17, 2015 | The New York Times

By Isabel Kershner

A softly lit case displays a small, gnarled implement that is said to be the world’s oldest known complete sickle, dating back 9,000 years. On a wall nearby, a video installation called “Shopping Day,” made by the Israeli artist Doron Solomons and set in an immaculate supermarket, offers a wry reflection on the branding and packaging of modern consumer products.
The two pieces, representing the genesis of agriculture and its latest end products, are part of an exhibit titled “A Brief History of Humankind,” a centerpiece of the 50th-anniversary celebrations this spring at the Israel Museum.
In a country that seems be growing more insular in some ways, plagued by conflict, threatened by diplomatic isolation and focused on its internal divisions, the exhibit tries to convey a more universal message: the story of civilization’s origins and development in the region, and the rare ability Israel and its national museum have to tell this story to the world.
The exhibit is drawn largely from the museum’s vast holdings, and was inspired by the international best-seller “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind,” by the Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari. It presents a sweeping narrative covering about 1.5 million years. About a dozen artifacts, some of them hundreds of thousands of years old and unearthed close by, represent milestones in the development of human civilization, and they are juxtaposed with contemporary artwork from around the world dealing with related themes.
A visitor walked past "Evolution and Theory," by the artist Zadok Ben-David, part of "A Brief History of Humankind," an exhibit at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. The exhibit is the part of the museum’s 50th anniversary celebrations this spring. Credit Uriel Sinai for The New York Times
“It is kind of the slow morphing of civilization as we know it,” said James S. Snyder, the museum’s director, adding that the exhibit was meant to show how that historical process “connects to the present and has universal meaning.”
Mr. Snyder, a former deputy director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, said that in the 1960s, when the Israel Museum was inaugurated, very few institutions were dealing both with “the long narrative” and with the avant-garde.
The museum is Israel’s largest cultural institution, presiding over Jerusalem from a hilltop site alongside the Knesset and the Supreme Court. To the right of the entrance is the Shrine of the Book, containing the Dead Sea Scrolls, the oldest known surviving copies of biblical documents. A vivid crimson mirror-polished stainless steel sculpture called “Sacred Heart,” by the American artist Jeff Koons and lent to the museum by a private collector especially for the anniversary, is on display in the front courtyard, and there are works by Picasso and Henry Moore in a nearby sculpture garden.
Starting almost from scratch, the museum has built up holdings of 500,000 objects. It now has a unique collection of Holy Land archaeological finds representing pre-biblical times as well as Judaism, Christianity and Islam; an encyclopedic collection of Judaica; and a distinguished range of Modernist artworks.
Some critics have dismissed the “Brief History” exhibit as a superficial, even gimmicky romp through history with too many gaps. But its curator, Tania Coen-Uzzielli, says that because of where it is and what it has, the Israel Museum is one of only a few institutions in the world that could mount such an exhibit.
The “Survival and Extinction” section offers evidence of the coexistence of Neanderthals and Homo sapiens in the Middle East. “These are our two main actors,” Ms. Coen-Uzzielli said. “It begins there.”
A group of skulls, early evidence of family burial, is matched with Charles Ray’s 1993 work “Family Romance,” a model of a mannequin-like nuclear family with Freudian overtones. A page from the original manuscript of Einstein’s special theory of relativity, symbolizing the cusp of the electronic and nuclear age, is displayed against the background of Bruce Conner’s 1976 video “Crossroads,” with its footage of nuclear tests and mushroom clouds.
Other anniversary exhibits include a retrospective of Israeli art; special projects by six contemporary Israeli artists; and a nostalgic display of 50-year-old Israeli household objects, including an electric blue, locally manufactured refrigerator and a Gottex swimsuit. “It’s ‘Mad Men’ comes to Israel,” Mr. Snyder said.
When the museum opened in 1965, the modern state of Israel was 17 years old, and Jerusalem was a small and isolated town, with its eastern portions controlled by Jordan. The museum’s cubelike pavilions, designed by Alfred Mansfeld and Dora Gad, were meant as a Modernist interpretation of an Arab or a Mediterranean village.
It was a more innocent time, when Israel was still struggling to survive, before the euphoric victory in the war of 1967 that turned into a grinding occupation.
The museum was first conceived by Teddy Kollek, who was a chief aide to Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, and later had a long tenure as Jerusalem’s mayor and master builder. The original idea was to focus on Judaica and archaeology, but Mr. Kollek worried that it would be too provincial and pushed to open the museum up to general art.
Since then, Israeli society has grown more fractious and divided, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict more entrenched.
The anniversary exhibits at the museum only hint at the conflict, in a project by the Israeli photographer Roi Kuper called “Gaza Dream.” It shows Gaza as a distant, hazy mirage in a series of panoramic photographs taken from the Israeli side of the border shortly after the war in Gaza last summer.
Some Israelis now ask whether the Israel Museum hews too closely to the mainstream consensus.
A critical article about the anniversary featured in Galleria, the culture supplement of the liberal newspaper Haaretz, appeared under the title “The Mausoleum.” The museum deals “not with the here and now,” the article said, “but with what was and always will be,” while relying on local motifs like the land of the Bible or the cradle of Christianity. While that approach has been popular and useful for fund-raising, the article argued, it raised questions about the museum’s relevancy and its commitment to the local contemporary art scene.
Eva Illouz, a professor of sociology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, said that the museum had succeeded in becoming a national institution, but that she viewed it with a degree of ambivalence.
“I don’t think it gives any place, really, to the political and ethnic conflicts of Israeli society,” she said. “I think the next step is to bring Israeli society more into the museum, and not to shy away from controversial topics. Art should not make society look beautiful.”
The museum has tried to be more inclusive. A 2012 exhibition called “A World Apart Next Door” offered a rare glimpse into the lives of Hasidic Jews and attracted 330,000 visitors.
A single-day record of 12,400 visitors attended an open house at the museum on the day of the anniversary, May 11.
Martin Weyl helped build the museum as a young man, and then rose from being an assistant curator to chief curator to director of the museum before he retired in 1996.
“I remember standing next to Teddy when the museum opened,” Mr. Weyl recalled, referring to Mr. Kollek, “and he said, ‘How are we ever going to fill up these galleries?’ ”
They filled up.
With the completion of a $100 million renewal project in 2010, the museum doubled its exhibition space to 200,000 square feet, but Mr. Snyder said the number of objects on display was reduced, to 7,000 from 10,000, to give each item more breathing room.

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Israel Museum Partners Internationally for 50th Anniversary

May 27, 2015 | Art Info Blog

To celebrate its 50th anniversary, the Israel Museum in Jerusalem is hosting a series of shows that pair work from its archeological and fine arts collections with loans from museums across the world, including the British Museum, the Louvre, and the Rijksmuseum.
On view now through September 20, a loan from the Vatican Library joins together two volumes of Maimonides’ “Mishneh Torah,” an illuminated Hebrew manuscripts dating from the 15th century in Northern Italy, after 200 years apart.
Next, two Rembrandt paintings depicting the same white-bearded sitter — the Rijksmuseum’s “Jeremiah Lamenting the Destruction of Jerusalem,” 1630, and Israel Museum’s “St. Peter in Prison (The Apostle Peter Kneeling),” 1631 — will be reunited for the first time in the upcoming show “Rembrandt from Amsterdam to Jerusalem,” opening June 3.
Three bronze busts of Hadrian, the Emperor of Jerusalem (117 – 138 CE) will be seen together for the first time in “Cast in Bronze: Hadrian x 3 ”, opening December 22. The same month, a Wassily Kandinsky painting will be added to the show “Twilight over Berlin: 50 Masterworks from the Neue Nationalgalerie, 1905-1945.”
“We are profoundly grateful for exemplary partnerships such as these, and we look forward to continuing this level of international cultural collaboration in the future,” director James S. Snyder said in a statement.

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The Israel Museum Presents ‘A Brief History of Humankind’

May 1, 2015 | The Wall Street Journal

By Jessica Dawson

Since its creation 50 years ago this month, Jerusalem’s Israel Museum has had a mandate to cover the full breadth of human history, from ancient treasures like the Dead Sea Scrolls to the latest creations of contemporary artists.
In 1965, this was innovative, says James Snyder, the museum’s director for the past 18 years. Since then, various major museums have followed suit—for one, New York’s Brooklyn Museum, which included an ancient Egyptian artifact in a recent exhibition about high heels. This spring, the Israel Museum is celebrating its extremely varied collection—which the museum has kept up through decades of acquisitions—in an anniversary exhibition with the ambitious title, “A Brief History of Humankind.”
Though the museum’s 20-acre campus retains separate wings for various disciplines, a 2010 overhaul began to break down the boundaries between fine art and material culture—now a commonplace strategy in major museums—even as the makeover doubled usable gallery space.MORE ICONSThe Israel Museum Presents ‘A Brief History of HumankindPostwar Europe, Up Close and PersonalCollector’s Eye: Doris FisherOrientalist Art Makes a Surprising ComebackThe Shroud of Turin, Displayed and Debated
For “Humankind,” curator Tania Coen-Uzziellimined the 500,000-object permanent collection of the museum. She has picked 14 key historical artifacts. The earliest is a set of tools from the Jordan Valley that were used 1.4 million years ago; the most recent is a 1912 manuscript of Einstein’s theory of relativity. She then juxtaposed those 14 objects with contemporary art from Israel and around the globe.ENLARGEThe oldest complete sickle PHOTO: THE ISRAEL MUSEUM, JERUSALEM
Yuval Noah Harari’s book “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind” inspired the exhibition. Translated from Hebrew into more than 20 languages (it was published in English in February), Mr. Harari’s book attempts to explain how Homo sapienstriumphed over other human species. Like the book, Ms. Coen-Uzzielli’s exhibition touches on key revolutions in agriculture, cognition and technology. She show’s Einstein’s breakthrough theorem, which is emblematic of the modern age, alongside artist Bruce Conner’s 1976 video “Crossroads,” which incorporates footage of nuclear-bomb tests.Advertisement
In a similar vein, the museum has installed three Neolithic-era skulls, which were recovered from a family grave, next to a Freudian-themed sculpture by Charles Raycalled “Family Affair,” from the early 1990s. Ms. Coen-Uzzielli speaks of “a dialogue between objects of the past and contemporary art” to underline the undiminished importance of families over 9,000 years.
Although flare-ups in the Arab-Israeli conflict have at times kept away tourists, the number of annual visitors to the museum has risen from 350,000 a decade ago to over 760,000 in 2014. The exhibition, which began Friday, ends Dec. 26.

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The world’s smallest Bible, now on view at the Israel Museum

Apr 27, 2015 | JTA

By Gabe Friedman

You’ve never seen the Bible like this before. That is, if you can actually see this version.
For the 50th anniversary of the Shrine of the Book wing of the Israel Museum, which houses the Dead Sea Scrolls, the museum has launched an exhibition on the “nano bible,” or the world’s smallest Bible, created by Israeli scientists at the Technion.
The Nano Bible, which is engraved onto a 0.5 mm2 chip and is barely visible – a Technion descriptioncompares it to the size of a grain of sugar – was first produced back in 2009, when one of the first copies was given to Pope Benedict XVI on his trip to Israel.BREAKING NEWSNetanyahu, Kerry call for end to incitement at Berlin meetingAthens Jewish cemetery vandalizedMonuments Men Foundation to close
This Bible, conceived by Uri Sivan and Ohad Zohar of the Russell Berrie Nanotechnology Institute at the Technion, is technically an engraving. To produce it, engineers took a wafer of silicon, coated it with a layer of gold less than 100 atoms thick and engraved the text with a focused ion laser beam. Engraving the book’s 1,200,000 Hebrew letters would have been an, ahem, biblical undertaking, so naturally the scientists devised a computer program that allowed the ion beam to inscribe the letters in around an hour and a half. Compare that to the year and a half it can take for a scribe to complete a kosher, hand-lettered Torah scroll.
“More than any other book, the Bible symbolizes the transmission of human civilization from one generation to another,” Sivan said. “We tried to connect to the device. We wanted to get people curious about the revolution that is taking place before their eyes.”
The exhibition, which opened on April 20, runs through the end of next year. A video on Technion’s Facebook page gives more background on the exhibit and its origins.

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At 50, Israel Museum Looks to Local Artists

Apr 18, 2015 | Forward

By David Stromberg

Mira Lapidot, 44, has risen through the ranks of the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, starting her career 16 years ago as a guide and, in the past three years, serving as chief curator of the fine arts wing. Yet at that moment of personal achievement she and her team were already planning what they knew would be a major event — the Israel Museum’s 50th anniversary this year — with a year-long exhibition titled “6 Artists, 6 Projects.” They didn’t know whom they’d exhibit, or what, but they knew that however the show took shape, it would amplify a challenge they constantly face: negotiating the relationship between the Israel Museum and the Israeli art world.
The complexity of this relationship, which has been present from the museum’s very beginnings, comes from an inherent tension within Israeli art itself. On the one hand there’s a desire for artists to be judged by international standards, without anyone getting special leeway for being Israeli. On the other hand, it’s impossible to ignore the specificity of a place like Israel, especially where artworks are concerned.
“Art should be good as art,” Lapidot said. “But if we think about it without the local aspect, we can lose something — codes that help us understand the work, as well as the inner evolution of art in Israel relating to schools of influence or style. And the Israel Museum, considering even its name, has a responsibility to encourage, showcase and promote Israeli art.”
Image: Courtesy of Israel Museum
Present Meets Past: Photographer Uri Gershuni converts Google Street View images using 19th century techniques.
The precedent for how Israeli art was incorporated into the Israel Museum’s activities was set by its first artistic director, legendary Dutch curator and typographer Willem Sandberg. In the early 1960s Sandberg retired after over 30 years of curatorial work at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. When the Israel Museum opened in 1965, Sandberg was recruited to direct the museum’s development, which he did for three years.
The choice of Sandberg was anything but trivial, Lapidot points out, because at that time the museum’s stronger collections consisted of antiquities. But the museum’s founders believed that the art collection would follow if the museum was built in a serious way.
“Sandberg’s challenge was to bring the arts to a young museum in a provincial place,” Lapidot said. “Sandberg had a radical approach. He was open to contemporary art and art in Israel — they were one and the same for him. With Sandberg it was the work itself that mattered.”
During those years a young Yona Fischer, today an Israeli legend in his own right, was made the museum’s curator of Israeli and modern art. In 1961, Fischer had interned under Sandberg at the Stedelijk, and he went on to build up the museum’s art collection, both during Sandberg’s tenure and afterward, holding his position for the next quarter-century. Fischer was known for traveling across Israel and spending time with artists in their studios. He was also known for focusing on specific artists and supporting them in the long term. The museum grew and Fischer’s role expanded from senior curator to artistic adviser. In the early 1980s, Yigal Zalmona was added to the staff as curator of Israeli art, focusing on building the museum’s collections and exhibitions within an Israeli context.
Image: Courtesy of Israel Museum
Since the 1990s, however, the emphasis on Israeli art has slowly waned, with the representation of local and global art becoming increasingly fluid. Which is one reason why having an anniversary exhibit in which the museum’s ultimate decision — to present only Israeli artists — is, for the curators, a big deal.
“6 Artists, 6 Projects” is the first major contemporary art exhibition in the Israel Museum’s yearlong lineup of anniversary programming, and it features a multitude of media including photography, sculpture and installation, by artists Uri Gershuni, Roi Kuper, Dana Levy, Tamir Lichtenberg, Ido Michaeli and Gilad Ratman. Each artist is allotted a separate space within the museum’s large fine art exhibition halls, so that each has the equivalent of a solo exhibit the size of a very large gallery. And while there is enough space between the exhibits to give them a sense of completion, the galleries also lead into each other so that a sense of the larger picture remains.
Image: Courtesy of Israel Museum
In beginning their research for the exhibition, Lapidot and her team visited dozens of artists in their studios, something they do regularly in order to get an idea of what work is being produced throughout the country. “We were very open in our process,” Lapidot said. “There was no prepared list of artists, styles, genders. We also knew we couldn’t do something that was representational of Israeli art today. It’s more of a snapshot of a tendency or spirit.” The projects Lapidot was most impressed by were those that were not about the artists themselves, but that showed a curiosity for the world.
Each of the four curators involved in the show went to visit different artists. They wanted to get away from the tendency of “star art” in which young artists are promoted above others. They were also interested in artists who’d been working for 20, 30 or 40 years — those who were active for long periods in the art world. But the main criterion was that the work would be interesting and direct the show to a deeper place. Artists couldn’t be included just because they were “cool.”
Lapidot also insisted that the projects would not be specifically commissioned by the museum — that artists would show curators what they were working on and that decisions would be made based on works already in progress. This also meant that the curators had to have a good grasp of the works they were interested in exhibiting. “When you work at a place like a museum, most of your time goes to production, and there’s less time for reflection or speaking,” she said. “This process forced us to describe what we saw, to pitch it and convince others.”
The show includes a range of approaches that combine material processes, conceptual planning and technical acuity. In Gilad Ratman’s video installation “Five Bands from Romania,” shown on two wall-sized screens and accompanied by a sound booth in the gallery, heavy metal musicians prepare a gigantic pit in a large grassy space and bury their amplifiers. They then spread out around the mound of dirt and, to the acoustic beat of five drum sets, begin to play all at once — their distorted guitars and voices muffled by the freshly dug earth.
Ido Michaeli’s “Bank Hapoalim Carpet” (2013) incorporates graphic adaptations of Israeli, Jewish and Zionist symbols into the tradition of Afghan carpet-weaving, resulting in an art object with an incongruous mix of cultural, religious and political codes. Alongside the carpet is a documentary-style video work that traces the object’s creation.
Dana Levy’s “Literature of Storms” is shown in two small spaces. In one, she has exhibited images of 1920s apartment interiors on which she projects videos of winds, downpours and swarms of insects that animate the still scenes. In the second space, Levy shows a video titled “Everglades,” begun at the Everglades National Park in Florida, a dark work of nature onto which she projects bright multicolored lights.
In “Apollo and the Chimney-Sweeper,” photographer Uri Gershuni follows in the footsteps of Henry Fox Talbot, a British inventor and scientist who created a precursor to the photographic process in the mid-19th century. After a visit to Talbot’s home village, Lacock, in rural England, Gershuni undertook a new process of his own: turning Google Street View images into light blue cyanotypes using a process that was originally used in architecture to create what are better known as blueprints.
Roi Kuper, one of Israel’s leading photographers, presents several series of works in his signature large format style, this time of Israel’s border with Gaza. He started the project in the spring of 2014 and the history between the two territories gave this landscape project a political underbelly. Israel’s summer conflict with Hamas accentuated the significance of this complex border, while suggesting that any time a camera is used in this country the image can quickly become more significant than its creator had planned.
Image: Courtesy of Israel Museum
Finally, Tamir Lichtenberg’s “Package Deal” is a conceptual work exhibited as an installation, combining a theatrical set of ready-made objects and a series of screens showing video journals. Lichtenberg started the project by offering art collectors to pay him a salary of NIS 9,000 (approximately $2,300) for each month of the Jewish calendar in exchange for a box of work that he could make during that month. The collectors paid in advance for art that had not yet been created. The result is a collection of artifacts and videos that goes considerably beyond the limits of the project’s premise, providing a unique and nuanced view into the rhythm of contemporary life in Israel.
Lapidot says she and her team saw many other interesting projects during their search, some of which will undoubtedly appear in solo and group exhibits in the future. “I think we’re tough editors,” she said, “even if we don’t always make the right decisions. History will be our judge — and it can also judge differently at different times.”
In the end, the two criteria that emerged from the search were for the projects to be compelling within the artists’ larger bodies of work, and for each project to also hold an interest of its own. Ironically, one thing Lapidot is happy about is that critical reaction to the projects has been diverse. “No one came out victorious,” she explained. “If the popular vote had been too clear, then we wouldn’t have done our jobs.”

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The Israel Museum At 50

Mar 24, 2015 | The Jewish Week

By Nathan Jeffay

One wonders what the ancients responsible for the Dead Sea Scrolls would think if they could see their handiwork this April. How would they react if they saw that two millennia after they preserved sacred texts, people are doing the same — but with nano chips?
In the Shrine of the Book, the amazing domed Jerusalem building that houses the scrolls and tells their story, curators are about to display the world’s tiniest Torah, the Nano Bible. The Israeli innovation has fit the entire Bible onto an area smaller than the head of a pin, and the results will be there for all to see in a large case, along with information about how it was made.
“Visitors will see that the technology has changed, but people are busy preserving pretty much the same text,” said Adolfo Roitman, curator of the Shrine of the Book. “The idea is that on one side of the Shrine of the Book we have some of the oldest biblical texts, and in another place a Bible that results from technological advance.”
Shrine of the Book is part of the Israel Museum, where 50th anniversary celebrations have just gotten underway, led by director James S. Snyder, former deputy director of New York’s Museum of Modern Art. The nano-chip exhibition is one of numerous special anniversary displays at the museum — part of a program designed to highlight just how far the museum has come since it was established.
“When he founded our museum five decades ago, Teddy Kollek envisioned a truly encyclopedic museum in Israel,” says board chairman Isaac Molho. “In the years since, the museum has succeeded in creating meaningful connections with cultures from around the globe and with our nation’s creative heritage.”
Kollek, mayor of Jerusalem for almost three decades, took delight in the museum — but never lived to see it in its current form. The anniversary will take place with the museum looking its very best, because, along with special displays, it is sporting a $100 million renovation that was completed just five years ago. Kollek died shortly before the renovation work got underway.
The exhibition space is now doubled, to 200,000 square feet, but the number of objects on display was cut by almost a third (at any one time most of the collection, almost 500,000 objects, are in storage). The idea was to make the place far less cluttered, more aesthetically pleasing and more inviting to explore — and it seems to have worked. “The renovation has made it easier for visitors, and given the museum a very clear narrative,” says Daisy Raccah-Djivre, chief curator of the Jewish Art and Life Wing. “It arranged the objects in a way that makes going around easy, comfortable and clear.”
For the anniversary, Raccah-Djivre had the excitement of a delivery from the Vatican. In an arrangement that would have been unthinkable when the museum opened — there were no diplomatic relations between Israel and the Holy See until 1993 — she is displaying a rare manuscript that the Vatican is lending the museum for the occasion.
Back in the 15th century, an Italian scribe took the unusual step of producing an illuminated version of the Mishneh Torah, the work of Jewish law by Maimonides. The Israel Museum, together with the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, acquired one volume in 2013, but the other volume remained in the annals of the Vatican. The Vatican agreed to fly its volume to Jerusalem for the anniversary, so that the books can be displayed together. “There are very few illuminated manuscripts of legal codes, and this is one of the most beautiful examples, so we are excited to display the two volumes in one place,” says Raccah-Djivre.
The anniversary is also being marked with contemporary art exhibitions, one of which is “6 Artists / 6 Projects,” which includes six contemporary artists whose work reflects the diverse creativity of Israeli art today. Another exhibit is “Dan Reisinger: Graphic Design in Israel,” which examines a body of work by one of Israel’s most prominent graphic designers.
The Ruth Youth Wing for Art Education, will also have an exhibit that relates to anniversary celebrations. Its companion exhibition, “50 x 50,” features miniature diorama-style presentations of the Youth Wing’s 50-year history of annual exhibitions.
Every year the museum attracts almost a million visitors, from countries all over the world, and from every sector of Israeli society. “If you look in right now in the Israel Museum, you will see Christians, charedim, religious, secular, young and old — you will find everyone here,” says deputy director Zach Granit.
“We have 20 new exhibitions every year, which means that we always appeal to a wide, diverse audience. But this isn’t easy — we need to always make sure we have our finger on the pulse of what interests different people at different times.”

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AT THE ISRAEL MUSEUM, THE MENU MIRRORS THE ART

Mar 26, 2015 | Tablet

By Dana Kessler

Whether you’re there to see the Second Temple Model or to catch the latest contemporary art exhibition, you can end your visit to the Israel Museum with a meal at Modern, which was opened by food entrepreneur Zafrir Ginsberg and his wife Avital in 2011 after the museum’s renovation.
Jerusalem’s Modern is part of an international wave of trendy museum restaurants like The Modern at NYC’s Museum of Modern Art or Georges at the Pompidou Centre in Paris. Now, Jerusalem’s Modern is looking to the world of art for inspiration for its menu.
The restaurant’s new Spring menu, under the direction of chef Avi Peretz, features art-inspired items like “Jackson’s Chicken Kadaif,” A dish described as “Pullet, kadaif threads, walnuts and cinnamon in a plate that Jackson Pollock would have loved.” The plate is full of colored edible drizzles, inspired by Pollock’s style of drip-painting.
The other two art-inspired specials are “Cézanne’s garden,” an antipasti dish served on thin Urfali bread and inspired by Paul Cézanne’s famous landscapes, and “Tartar square a-la Mondrian,” which is finely chopped raw sirloin steak served with three squares of dressing, echoing Piet Mondrian’s famous squares.
“I think that art and food are very similar since both are open to interpretation,” Ginsberg told me. “Two people can look at the same painting or taste the same dish and feel something completely different and notice different things. Reception of both art and food have to do with the senses, with personal taste and with each person’s previous experiences and knowledge.”
Before Modern opened, the Israel Museum only had a cafeteria, as was the case for many years at most of the museums across the world. “Combining the museum experience with a dining experience is a trend of the past 10 years,” Ginsberg explained. “Restaurateurs always wanted to open in museums but the museums didn’t go for it. When the financial crisis started and museums weren’t getting enough funds or donations they started looking for new means of income and started becoming open to the idea.”
“The location is very significant,” Ginsberg added. “It defines the target audience, which in our case is made up of 50 percent tourists, and it also obligates you to relate to your surroundings. Most of our clientele is here for the museum, and we have to give them a culinary experience that compliments that. You can’t open a steak house in a museum. And it’s not just about the food, but also about the design. We worked on the design together with James S. Snyder, the director of the Israel Museum. Together we decided to design the restaurant in the style of early Modernism.”
Modern, which overlooks the Valley of the Cross and the Knesset, and caters not only to guests of the museum but also to politicians and media types, serves contemporary Jerusalem-style cuisine. “Jerusalem cooking means cooking on kerosene burners, it means being influenced by the Diaspora, it means slow cooking, it means using a lot of legumes and olive oil,” Ginsberg explained. “We took all those things, that comprise traditional Jerusalem cooking, and gave them a modern twist.”

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