The Umm el-Fahm Art Gallery has been awarded museum status by the Culture Ministry and its new name – The Umm el-Fahm Museum of Art, in memory of Walid Abu Shakra – honors the late Sufi artist.
“This is the realization of a 30-year-old dream,” museum director Said Abu Shakra said on Thursday. “I want to stand on the tallest hill in the city and shout: ‘I am the happiest man alive!’”
The new designation comes at the heels of the annual conference of the local chapter of the International Council of Museums, held in June at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, which addressed “Cultural resilience in times of crisis.”
Curators, scholars, and educators gathered to exchange their respective experiences and discuss what might be done to create a better future.
Many curators pointed out huge efforts have been made to translate exhibition texts into Arabic and keep the museums open to school visits by Arab-Israeli pupils and their teachers.
Meanwhile, Rahat was selected to form the country’s first Arab acting studio. This is the first time state support has been offered to an Arab cultural institution.
The Contemporary Art Center in Ramle will be closing
But not all art centers had good news to share. Art curator Smadar Sheffi noted that the Contemporary Art Center in Ramle will be closing. The center – the only contemporary art space in Ramle – has been open for about five years.
During a panel discussion, Gilad Lavian, director of the Islamic Art Museum in Jerusalem, told the audience that a variety of issues surfaced following Hamas’s October 7 mega-atrocity in Israel. This has included the museum undergoing a security-risk analysis by the police, since “Islam” is in its name; and questioning the museum’s current food-focused exhibition.
“The text of the exhibition says that the Arab fighters who spread Islam drank camel milk and ate dates,” he said as an example. “Some of the Hamas terrorists brought with them from Gaza bags of dates as food.” The fear, he explained, was that someone might make a false analogy between past and present in a way that would bestow some alleged dignity to the heinous acts of Hamas. After discussions, the dates remained in the exhibition text.
Tania Coen-Uzzielli, director of the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, noted that “Museums have become scenes of struggle and protest.” The entrance to her museum, known as Hostage Square, is a public space for the families of those held captive by Hamas terrorists, as well as the site of support rallies.
This openness of museums to ideas, and the expectation that art should be available for public viewing, has also been exploited at times. For instance, the 1914 Portrait of Lord Balfour, by Philip Alexius de Laszlo, was defaced by a pro-Palestinian protester in March at Cambridge University’s Trinity College. Activists from Just Stop Oil glued themselves to a painting The Hay Wain by John Constable at the National Gallery London last year. The painting was partly obstructed by a dystopian vision of the landscape it originally depicted.
Activists, whatever their cause, have almost always selected Western art and artists as their targets.