The Art Museum at Kibbutz Ein Harod was founded by kibbutz members, who believed that culture and art were among the formative constituents of a society.
By GIL STERN STERN GOLDFINEJosef Zaritsky art 88 224(photo credit: Museum of Art, Ein Harod)
Considered Israel's first art museum, regional or otherwise, the Mishkan L'Omanut (The Art Museum) at Kibbutz Ein Harod in the Jezreel Valley, opened its doors in 1948, 17 years before the Israel Museum in Jerusalem and 22 years before the Tel Aviv Museum. This remarkable institution was founded by the kibbutz members, who believed that culture and art were among the formative constituents of a society and had to be integrated into their daily chores.
Designed by Samuel Bickels, the building is among the first museums in the country designed in the modernist style that uses natural indirect light to illuminate the displays. It was the collection amassed by portrait painter Chaim Atar, a kibbutz member and founder of the museum, that served as the basis for the museum's current holdings of some 16,000 works: Judaica and Jewish folk art, paintings, sculptures and works on paper by European Jewish artists as well as an excellent representative collection of works by Israeli artists.
Galia Bar-Or was appointed director and curator of the Museum of Art in Ein Harod in 1985, a position she continues to hold. She has mounted more than 40 exhibitions and has written books, catalogs and essays for most, including definitive works on Michael Druks, Henry Shelesnyak and Aviv Uri. Born in 1952 in Kibbutz Ein Harod, Bar-Or received both her master's degree and PhD from Tel Aviv University's School of History. Her doctoral dissertation, "Our Life Requires Art: Art Museums in the Kibbutz 1930-1960," made her and the museum she runs the perfect mix to mount the first decade of Israeli art.
During her tenure, she has collaborated with curators from Germany and Japan and was the curator of the Israel pavilions at the Sao Paulo and Istanbul Biennales. In 1986 Bar-Or founded and directed Israel's first Biennale of Photography, a landmark event that altered the status of photography as an art form in the country. With the current exhibition Bar-Or continues her curatorial responsibilities, with limited budgets, to shape the Museum of Art at Ein Harod into one of the country's foremost exhibition venues.
Curator, historian and theoretician Gideon Ofrat was born in Tel Aviv in 1945. He is indisputably the country's preeminent scholar in the field of the plastic arts, past and present. His academic career began at Tel Aviv University followed by advanced studies at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, and the Hebrew University, where he received his PhD in 1974. For many years Ofrat's interests were concentrated in the theater but his attention turned to the visual arts and he has written more than a score of books and exhibition catalogs, including the encyclopedic survey One Hundred Years of Art in Israel, published as a lucid narrative in 1998.
Ofrat's curatorial skills began in the late 1970s when he documented Israel's entrance into the fields of installation and conceptual art. His achievements continued at the 1993 Israel pavilion of the Venice Biennale for which he enlisted Avital Geva to create an environmental Greenhouse Project. Once again, in 1995, Ofrat returned to Venice and employed artists Joshua Neistein and Uri Tzaig and the writer David Grossman to empower his multi-tech media exhibition entitled "The Book." His knowledge of the subject and insights on the current exhibition, The First Decade: A Hegemony and a Plurality, have been immeasurable.
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