The Israeli painter, sculptor, ceramicist, and textile designer Siona Shimshi was born in Tel Aviv to a family that had migrated to Palestine from Lithuania. Shimshi studied at the Avni Institute from 1956 to 1959 and went on to study ceramics at Alfred University and, from 1959 to 1962, at Greenwich House Pottery in New York. While in Israel, in 1966 Shimshi helped found the art group Ten+. From 1979 to 1987, she chaired the Department of Ceramic Design at the Bezalel School of Arts and Crafts. Her ceramic sculptures are often figurative busts in which she emphasizes or manipulates discrete facial features to express complex ideas and narrative themes.
Avot 5:6: Ten things were created on the eve of the Sabbath at twilight: The mouth of the earth, the mouth of the well, the mouth of [Balaam’s] ass, the rainbow, the manna, the rod, the shamir-worm…
In the 1970s, Weisel, the daughter of Holocaust survivors, made a series of abstract paintings inspired by her father’s tattoo from Auschwitz. The central rectangle in this painting resembles a…
Early in his career, Castel often painted pictures of Jews, like these, whose roots were in Arab lands. Many at the Bezalel School of Arts and Crafts, where he studied, believed that Yemenite Jews…