Haifa Museum of Art

The museum occupies a three-story stone building at 26 Shabtai Levi Street, between Wadi Nisnas and Hadar.[1][4] Its curatorial work connects exhibitions with the social and cultural complexity of this urban setting.[4] The surrounding area brings together Jewish, Muslim, and Christian neighborhoods, a context reflected in the museum’s efforts to present different voices within Israeli art.[6]

In 2017, the museum was described as one of Israel’s three largest contemporary-art museums, with more than 7,500 works by Israeli and international artists and two to three new exhibitions annually.[7] By 2024, its permanent display focused on Israeli painting from the 1950s through the 2000s, while rotating exhibitions emphasized contemporary Israeli painting.[8] Collection research and exhibitions have also brought earlier twentieth-century art and material from other municipal museum collections into its program.[3][9]

Founded in 1951 at the initiative of Haifa mayor Abba Hushi, the museum was originally located in City Hall.[1] Its present building was constructed in the 1920s and served as an Anglican girls’ school.[7] During the 1930s, the school educated girls of different religions; after 1948, the building accommodated new immigrants before becoming a museum in 1967.[3] The stone building is designated for preservation, and two tall windows were reopened to the outside as part of changes described in 2024.[7][3]

Early exhibition publications document the institution under the name Museum of Modern Art.[10][11] A catalog published in Haifa by the municipality’s Museum of Modern Art records a November 1968 exhibition of painter Shmuel Schlesinger, with text by Gabriel Talphir and an English translation by Miriam Tal.[10] A 1973 poster advertised “Self-Portrait in Israeli Art” at the Haifa Museum of Modern Art; the surviving item belongs to the Zichron Yaakov historical archive collection.[11]

The museum marked its seventieth anniversary in 2021 with “The Haifa Way,” also rendered as “Way of Haifa,” an exhibition extending throughout the building and reconsidering the collection accumulated over seven decades.[6] Curated by Kobi Ben-Meir, it offered an alternative reading of local art history from the 1950s onward, giving particular attention to artists from Haifa and northern Israel, including Ori Reisman, Michael Gross, Batya Grossbard, Hannah Levy, and Gershon Knispel.[12]

The collection contained about 8,000 works in 2021 and was reported at more than 8,000 when chief curator Kobi Ben-Meir began exploring its stored holdings in 2022.[12][4] A broader review, begun around 2021, sought to reassess and expand holdings whose principal emphasis had been Israeli art from the 1950s onward.[8]

A 2022 collection exhibition included Ori Reisman’s mid-1970s view of the Jordan Valley, Michael Gross’s 1971 diptych “Blue Dawn,” and Gershon Knispel’s 1956 painting “The Employment Bureau.”[4] Knispel’s painting depicts job seekers including an Arab laborer, a religious Jewish man, and a North African immigrant, alongside a barefoot Arab girl holding a toddler.[4] Ben-Meir called the painting “a little prophetic,” noting that the Wadi Salib riots occurred three years after its creation.[4]

In 2018, the museum acquired 13 contemporary works made by Israeli artists during the 2000s, at a total cost of NIS 110,000.[13] Among them was Shay Arik’s “Uprising I,” an installation of blades pointed toward viewers, with plants emerging from the knives.[13] The idea originated during the “Knife Intifada,” and curator Revital Silverman-Green described its plants as flowers of Israel and Palestine, “delicate yet made of cold metal.”[13] The acquisitions were subsequently displayed in a recent-acquisitions space at the Hermann Struck Museum, curated by Silverman-Green.[13]

The 2024 exhibition “A Sun-Kissed Land: The Schusterman Collection at the Museum” presented works donated by Lynn Schusterman, who had collected them with her late husband Charles.[3] The donation included paintings, curios, and tapestries from the first half of the twentieth century, adding material earlier than the museum’s principal holdings.[3] Works from the early Bezalel period appeared alongside maps and tapestries relating to the First Aliyah and Hanukkah candelabras incorporating ancient coins.[3]

Preservation and research preceded the Schusterman Collection’s display.[8] Conservation revealed a two-sided work by Nachum Gutman dating from the 1930s.[8] Ben-Meir described the collection as adding an important historical and artistic layer to holdings previously concentrated on art made from the 1950s onward.[8]

“The Haifa Way,” which opened in June 2021, brought together works by 128 Israeli and Palestinian artists, combining the permanent collection with temporary loans.[14] Its aims included reconsidering Israeli art history through a wider range of voices and addressing social wounds in Haifa and Israel.[6] Ben-Meir said its inclusive approach had acquired particular importance after the May 2021 unrest in mixed cities, including Haifa.[14]

Ben-Meir observed that the collection had previously contained very little Palestinian or Arab Israeli art and argued that the museum should reflect the Hebrew and Arabic heard in the surrounding streets.[14] Participating artist Abed Abdi described “Refugees Waiting for Their Return” (2018) as a depiction of himself and his family in 1948.[14] He recounted fleeing through Haifa’s port, spending nearly three years in refugee camps in Lebanon and Damascus, and returning through family reunification.[14]

In August 2024, the museum opened six solo exhibitions featuring female artists from northern Israel or with strong ties to the region.[5] The season was intended to support northern residents amid displacement and cross-border attacks, with exhibitions addressing women’s perspectives, life in Israel, and wartime adversity.[5]

Ella Littwitz presented sculpture, photography, video, and audio works dealing with conflict and the hope of light.[5] Liron Hana Ohayon and Amit Gavish showed videos of six women newly arrived in Haifa, while Rachel Anyo’s collage project involved 13 women of Ethiopian origin and drew on family-album images and their experiences.[5] Hadar Saifan exhibited video and photography made while following activity on the northern border, and Lihie Talmor and Merav Sudaey presented print and mixed-media work.[5]

In May 2026, four exhibitions used the museum’s collection and Haifa location as starting points for historical, geographic, and social inquiry.[15] One examined 1970s landscape painting and its relationship to the local landscape and art world.[15] “People’s Language,” by Laila Abdelrazak and Dana Mazal Ziv, developed through dialogue with Arabic speakers in Haifa and its surroundings, while Moshe Roas’s “Button and Flower” engaged with a collection of Moroccan material culture.[15]

The 2025 exhibition “Africa Calling” presented African objects held in Haifa Museums’ stores, including hundreds of items from the Federmann collection.[9] Curator Dorit Shafir described the challenge of organizing an exhibition drawn from many categories of objects rather than a chronological collection.[9] Displays included beaded fertility dolls and caps, snuff bowls, walking canes, stools, headrests, chiefs’ crowns, fabrics, and tools used by African healers.[9]

Curated by Shafir and Meir Itkin, the exhibition included royal drapes bearing the emblems of the kings of Dahomey, in present-day Benin, and Bambara masks associated with N’tomo initiation ceremonies in Mali.[16] A section devoted to sangoma healers of South African cultures displayed diagnostic objects including lion bones, snail shells, a drum, and herbs.[16]

The sangoma objects had been collected by Jewish-German art scholar Maria Stein-Lessing, who fled Nazi Germany and later operated the Johannesburg gallery L’Afrique.[16] Roza van Gelderen and Hilda Purwitsky subsequently acquired the collection; after van Gelderen’s death, Purwitsky donated it to Haifa’s Ethnographic Museum in the 1970s.[16]

Another collecting history involved Maurice Alhadeff, who sought to introduce African-made art to Western audiences and whose collection was estimated at 2,000 paintings in a 1953 report.[16] Alhadeff gave Haifa four paintings by Bela Sara, a Chad-born artist who painted with his fingers after being taught by Pierre Romain-Desfossés in the Congo.[16]

A 2025 commentary traces the Federmann holdings to a late-1966 request from mayor Abba Hushi, after which Yekutiel Federmann donated dozens of West African sculptures and other objects to Haifa’s Museum of Ethnology and Folklore.[17] It identifies their countries of origin as Ivory Coast, Mali, Nigeria, Ghana, and Upper Volta, and dates the first West African Art exhibition to January 1967.[17] Separate 2025 coverage calls a Michael Federmann-sponsored presentation “The Voice of Africa: The African Collection Rediscovered” and says it included approximately 300 objects; it also credits recent storage research and cataloging with revealing the collection’s breadth.[17]

In January 2019, Finnish artist Jani Leinonen’s “McJesus,” depicting Ronald McDonald crucified, became the focus of protests against the exhibition “Shop It!”[18][13] The museum presented the work as criticism of consumerism and corporations’ use of religious symbols for profit; some Christian residents regarded it as mocking Jesus and offending believers.[18][13] Church leaders and the museum director initially agreed to place a warning notice at the entrance about works that might offend religious feelings.[18]

An incendiary bottle was thrown toward the museum before the January 11 protest, causing no injuries or damage.[18] During that protest, approximately 200 demonstrators gathered, some attempted to enter the museum, stones were thrown at police, three officers suffered minor injuries, and one man was detained on suspicion of assaulting officers.[18] The wider dispute involved artists, curators, church leaders, municipal and national politicians, civil-rights organizations, and the court, with disagreements over authority to determine what could be exhibited.[19]

On January 17, mayor Einat Kalisch-Rotem announced that the sculpture would be removed following consultations with church leaders, noting that its loan from a Finnish museum was due to end that month.[2] The Association for Civil Rights condemned removal as “a capitulation to violence and a severe violation of artistic freedom of expression.”[2] Curator Svetlana Reingold defended the work as satirical and humorous, arguing that provoking controversy was a healthy part of art’s role.[13]