2024
Artist grants
50 artist grants were awarded in 2024, to the following artists:
Adva Karni • Ariel Hacohen • Chen Cohen • Daniel Kiczales • Eden Bannet • Eitan Ben Moshe • Elad Larom • Ella Amitay Sadovsky • Eshchar Hanoch Kliengbiel • Fatma Abu Romi • Gilead Ben Shatz • Hadar Gad • Hamutal Fishman • Hanita Ilan • Hilla Spitzer • Hillel Roman • Ira Eduardovna • Maayan Elyakim • Michal Bachi • Miriam Cabessa • Mor Afgin • Moran Kliger • Moshe Roas • Naama Roth • Nardin Srouji • Netally Scholsser • Netaly Aylon • Nevet Yitzhak • Oree Holban • Pesi Girsch • Public Movement • Rachel Kainy • Reli Abrahami • Ron Amir • Ronit Porat • Ruti Sela • Ruven Kuperman • Shir Raz • Tal Engelstein • Tali Milstein • Taliya Ben Abu • Tamar Livne • Tamar Oosterhof • Tsuki Garbian • Uriel Miron • Vardi Kahana • Yakira Ament • Yoav Emmanuel Weinfeld • Yonatan Ron • Zvi Lachman •
Members of the evaluation team:
Dr. Adina Kamien • Avi Lubin • Avi Sabag • Dr. Aya Lurie • Asad Azi • Daniel Landau • Daniel Shoshan • Deganit Berest • Drora Dominey • Dvora Liss • Eli Petel • Farid Abu Shakra • Hila Cohen Shneiderman • Dr. Housni Alkhateeb Shehada • Ilanit Konopny • Irit Levin • Leah Abir • Dr. Maayan Sheleff • Manar Zuabi • Dr. Nadeem Karkabi • Rinat Edelstein • Ron Bartush • Rula Khoury • Sergio Edelstein • Shlomit Breuer • Smadar Messing • Tal Yahas • Tali Ben Nun • Dr. Tali Tamir • Dr. Tamar Mayer • Udi Edelman • Yaniv Shapira • Yuri Katz •
Altogether, 1,500,000 NIS have been awarded as grants.
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Emergency grants
In 2024, the Plumas Arts Foundation dedicated resources to three projects of emergency response grants
in support of plastic artists who have been directly affected by the war.
- Plumas Art Foundation participated in Israel at Dawn`s project, which initiated a benefit art sale to raise funds for artists and art institutions in the South of Israel.
Plumas’s support of the project: 100,000 NIS
2. Studio Subsidies project
The Plumas Art Foundation joined forces with the Association of Plastic Artists (Igud HaOmanim) in planning and funding a grant project aimed at helping artists rent a studio space. 20 artists were selected following the publication of an open call and an application review process overseen by the Igud.
Total grants: 360,000 NIS
3. Acquisition of artworks for public institutions
The Plumas Arts Foundation collaborated with Igud HaOmanim in planning and funding a project of grants for public institutions dedicated to the purchase of contemporary art from Israeli artists, to be displayed in public spaces. The project is in the advanced stages of matching the artists’ works to the participating institutions. Upon the completion of the project, the institutions and the artworks that will be displayed in them will be announced.
The total funds allocated for the acquisition grants: 504,000 NIS
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2022-2023 Field research
(The Field Research Scholarship was not awarded in 2024)
Albert Swissa
Author, curator, writer of art essays and critique
Research subject: Creating, Beyond Objects
The research paper will be published in early 2025
Albert Swissa on the artists who participated in the research, in alphabetical order:
Aaron Pinchas Grundman – Aaron Pinchas (Roni) Grundman grew up in a distinctly artistic environment. Already as a child, he was discovered as a “gifted” painter, a talent that was received with cold indifference by his surroundings. Despite this, his childhood paintings are characterized by highly inspired and singular graphic intuitions, which ended by an almost complete years long disconnect. After years of a very long spiritual journey, in his old age he returned to painting, searching for the place of painting to which he may no longer be able to return. On the other hand, the future also promises nothing. He simply paints.
Yael Topol z”l – Her paintings explored the life of the Yemenite community in Israel in her childhood and teenage years, and she also specialized in Yemenite ceramic dinnerware and Jewish ceremonial objects (Judaica). She left an impressive body of work in painting and ceramics. The commemoration and presentation of her work to the general public are a matter of poetic and cultural justice, as she is also the voice of an entire generation of female artists, like the wonderful artist Sarah Alimi, who was active in the second half of the 20th century outside the Israeli mainstream, and whose poignant and critical work did not receive the status it deserved.
A retrospective show of her oeuvre will be displayed co-currently in two galleries in May-June 2025.
Yitzhak Yerushalmi – Yerushalmi is a self-taught photographer who did not know he was an artist, nor does he ask to be recognized as one. As an “outside kid” on a kibbutz in the 1970s, during the holidays he worked hard in the agricultural fields outside Morasha Maabara (immigrant transit camp), his childhood neighborhood, to buy himself a camera, and then for eight years he photographed and documented the people of the maabara with a lot of love and devotion. The 1,400 photographs he amassed are all from the Morasha Maabara and not a single photograph from the kibbutz. His photographs are an expression of exceptional photo-poetics and photo-therapy. It is also worth exploring the social and political aspects that inform them, which act as a resounding silence.
Photography exhibition at Musrara Gallery, Jerusalem, Oct-Nov 2023
Lobna Sana – A Bedouin architect and artist from the village of Al-Lagia, who combines architecture and art through the context of social activism in the public space. One of the founders of Saada Art Movement, which focuses on multidisciplinary and activist artistic expressions in the physical and thematic realm of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Miri Nishri – Miri Nishri focuses on everything that lies between creation and demise in the tangible contexts of their manifestation in the individual, private reality, and not just in the conceptual realm of the mind. Therefore, her interdisciplinarity is the interdisciplinarity of matter and the physical body, between creation and demise. The physical body in her work is first and foremost her own body, its bio-graphy, and her feminine experiences and childbirth serve as a unique and singular authoritative source of artistic creation. “Yet in my flesh I will see God” is her guiding principle, which she follows even when she moves to more general realms, such as the social-public and the political.
Nurit Agur – Agur’s work moves co-currently along two complementary and opposing axes. On the one hand, a redemptive utopian pursuit of the actual and finished work, and on the other hand, the work contains the line that distinguishes/complements between soul and body and between the sacred and the profane. The choice of different mediums is not in pursuit of diverse experiences, but rather material and formal dimensions that tirelessly strive for the same goal – offering remedy and solace. For every person, not just the artist herself.
Nidal Jabarin – Nidal Jabarin presents an exceptional, long and winding journey, between the sensitivity and inner loyalty of the soul and places, people, and things, their reflection through painting and their materialization in the blocks of stone. Above all, Jabarin strives for the dark realms of the soul – moods, illnesses, deformities, and madness – not as mysterious or scorned places that offer voyeuristic gratification, but as natural, authentic, real situations, prevalent and even common in life and in the world.
Akiva Torovsky – The world of Akiva Alon Torovsky originates in the cosmic marriage of heavens and earth, with a slight advantage to the heavens. In his work, this marriage does not go against the traditional horizontal division of nature in painting, which after the fact echoes mental and spiritual structures – since Torovsky is not at all interested in the language of painting. This pairing originates from extremely intense childhood experiences, which he perceives as bordering on revelations. The heaven and the earth and the fullness thereof are distilled in his work, as in a mutual reflection untouched and unspoiled by human hand. His painting is not a meditation (and certainly not a thought), nor is it an expression of emotion in the literal sense. For him, painting is being a brush for a hidden, unseen spirit.
Solo exhibition at Askila Gallery in Jaffa, December 2024.
Roger YchaÏ Benichou z”l – A unique interdisciplinary artist with every fiber of his being, who came from music and spiritual thought. His plastic work – both figurative and abstract – is a combination of philosophical and spiritual intention, creative collaboration, and dynamic, active, benevolent, and even ethical teaching. Even though it is born from the personal, his art already and always extends towards the common and general.
“Labyrinth” project, May 2025, MusraraMix Festival
A film about his work will be completed in the future.
Shlomo Vazana – a prolific and multidisciplinary social activist and artist who uses various mediums – sculpture, video, performance, happening, theater and cinema – as active, effective and site-specific means, in initiatives and social and transgressive political struggles.
Tahel Ran – An impressive artist who suddenly discovered her distinctive painting in a direct and unmediated way. The new artistic project and the piles of papers are a new discovery about the visual and plastic dimension of writing. The artist and her work evade cookie-cutter definitions.
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Policy and Rights
In 2024, the Plumas Arts Foundation continued its support in the efforts of the Association of Plastic Artists(Igud HaOmanim) to include an artist’s fee in the tests for distributing support funds of public galleries supported by the Ministry of Culture, and to obtain additional funds dedicated to this purpose.
The policy team of the Igud, headed by Revital Ben Asher Peretz, successfully led the project and accomplished its goals. In 2025, the Foundation will monitor the institutionalisation and implementation of these achievements.
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Theoretical Research
In 2024, the project Point of View, an online repository of texts written by Israeli artists, managed by MARCEL Art Projects was expanded.
A launch event was held in October 2024. The event included a premiere screening of a documentary film about artist Liliane Klapisch, produced by the Archive of the Future with the assistance of Point of View. It also featured a reading of texts written by artists in the first free writing workshop for plastic artists, initiated by Point of View.
For the transcript of the docu on Liliane Klapisch on the Point of View website
