Navigating the Contemporary Art Scene in Israel

Painting a Life between Memory, Identity, and Resistance

By Bonnie K. Goodman, BA, MLIS

When I moved to Jerusalem, I didn’t know that I was also stepping into a new chapter of my artistic life. I came with decades of experience—as a journalist, historian, librarian, educator, and artist—but in Israel, my work began to evolve in ways I hadn’t expected. Surrounded by layers of history, faith, conflict, and creativity, I found myself both challenged and inspired by the landscape—physical, political, and spiritual.

Israel’s contemporary art scene is as vibrant and multifaceted as the country itself. It doesn’t just reflect society; it interrogates it. From Tel Aviv’s sleek galleries to Jerusalem’s intimate artist collectives, Israeli artists are constantly grappling with identity, memory, trauma, belonging, and resistance. And in many ways, so am I.

Finding My Place as an Artist in Israel

As a Canadian-born Olah Hadashah (new immigrant to Israel), I now live and create art in a place where ancient tradition and contemporary experimentation coexist, often uncomfortably. That tension fuels much of the country’s most compelling art and has become a touchstone in my own work.

I am currently a participant in Studio of Her Own, a Jerusalem-based professional development program for primarily women artists. This experience has given me the tools and community to reframe my career in a new cultural and linguistic context. It’s also helped me more fully integrate my personal and professional identities: a Jewish woman rooted in historical research, feminist discourse, and diasporic memory now translating all of that into visual form.

Over the years, I have written nearly 2,000 articles on Jewish history, Zionism, antisemitism, and women’s voices.

My art is an extension of that body of work, another way to bear witness, to preserve, and to provoke.

Israeli Art: Where the Personal Is Always Political

Contemporary Israeli art doesn’t shy away from truths. It can’t. Artists here are constantly navigating a world shaped by conflict, displacement, faith, and reinvention. There is an urgency to the work. Even in its most intimate or abstract forms, there is often a sense that the stakes are high.

In Tel Aviv, you see this in the experimentalism of galleries like Sommer Contemporary and Dvir and in international platforms like the Venice Biennale. In Jerusalem, the atmosphere is different—denser, more introspective. The Israel Museum and smaller venues like the now-shuttered Barbur Gallery provide space for art that probes memory, identity, and sacred history. It was in Jerusalem that I reconnected with Jewish ritual and began weaving those elements more consciously into my artistic practice.

Themes That Speak to Me—and Through Me

My work, like that of many Israeli artists, is driven by recurring themes: trauma and survival, memory and forgetting, diaspora and homecoming, and the female body and voice. These aren’t abstract ideas—they’re personal, lived.

Some of the artists who inspire me the most are among the most influential feminist Israeli artists. Among them are Sigalit Landau, with her salt-crystallized objects from the Dead Sea, and Bracha L. Ettinger, an artist and writer, much like myself, whose psychoanalytic “matrixial gaze” reframes how we look at trauma and offers both intellectual and emotional frameworks for what art can do. I, too, try to make work that’s not just seen, but felt.

Recently, I have returned again and again to Jewish imagery: prayer, the Kotel, the chagim, Shabbat, and historical figures and places. I use these symbols not as nostalgia but as tools for storytelling—visual midrash, you could say. My portraits aim to restore a presence and power to those often erased or overlooked.

Creating from a Place of Loss and Continuity

In the last years of my mother’s life, something shifted. There was nothing that gave my mother more joy than my art. Her encouragement helped me re-immerse myself in my art. I started painting as a thirteen-year-old, growing up in Montreal, Quebec; I lived in an artistic, rich culture, far different from Israel.

With a French and European vibe, the art of Quebec is marked in color and joy, set in the background of the Quebec landscape, architecture, and seasons. It was the artists of Quebec that first inspired me, including Pauline T. Paquin, whose child-themed art represented all that is bright, fun, and innocent, like my childhood. My art consisted of the brightest acrylic colors and paintings of flowers, animals, and children.

In the last year of my mother’s life, her art—both paintings and textiles—inspired me to reimmerse myself in my own creative practice. I found new textures, colors, and rituals that helped me carry forward what she embodied. I began painting stories that had no words, only threads. Following my mother’s passing in 2022, I shifted from the vibrant colors of my youth to sketching in graphite and charcoal, as my perspective on the world became increasingly nuanced. The people who influenced me in my life became the models and sources of inspiration for my art.

The subject matter increasingly focuses on Judaism, spirituality, and piety. I began exploring these themes during my fine arts studies in college, where feminism and religion were the recurrent focus of my art history education. These same themes have gained greater importance since being in Israel. Jerusalem holds a profound spiritual significance. So did the political climate. In a society pulled between democracy and theocracy, peace and war, artists are often on the front lines of dissent. I see art as both an act of creation and a form of resistance.

I have long used journalism as a tool for advocacy and truth-telling, while as a historian I have emphasized Jewish history and the forgotten women’s voices. Now, my visual work takes on that same function, whether I am depicting a scene in Jerusalem’s streets, its historical architecture, the quiet natural beauty, or the spirituality or polarization of prayer.

Living Between Two Worlds

Being a Jewish artist in Israel, but also from the Diaspora, is a layered experience. I am always straddling two worlds. In my landscapes, you might see Montreal’s snowy streets juxtaposed with sunlit Jerusalem stones, Canadian maples to Israel’s palm trees and cactuses. That duality, my diasporic past and Israeli present, is not just aesthetic. It’s identity. It’s longing. It’s a bridge.

I often think about the Mizrahi and Palestinian artists whose work wrestles with questions of exclusion and belonging. Artists like Walid Raad or Erez Israeli have broadened my understanding of what Israeli art can be and who gets to tell its stories. They have challenged me to interrogate my role as an insider and an outsider, an academic and an artist, and an immigrant and a participant.

Where I Am Now: Art as Archive, Protest, and Prayer

Today, I am continuing my formal studies at Bezalel Academy’s Unit for Foreign and Continuing Studies. There, I am sharpening my techniques in painting, sculpture, and mixed media while grounding my practice in scholarship and Jewish education.

My journey is far from linear. There have been language barriers, cultural misunderstandings, and institutional resistance, especially for women trying to integrate Jewish tradition into contemporary writing and art. However, these very challenges have transformed into invaluable resources. I relentlessly erode these obstacles, chiseling away at them to create something fresh.

My art is not just what I create; it’s how I live, how I mourn, how I resist, and how I hope. It is a living archive of my experience as a Jewish woman, an immigrant, a daughter, a writer, and a witness.

Looking Forward

Contemporary Israeli art isn’t static—it’s becoming. It’s alive with contradiction and beauty, rupture and renewal. And I am proud to be part of it.

Each brushstroke, pencil line, or motif in my work carries memory and meaning. Whether I am depicting a soldier deep in prayer at the Kotel or illustrating the flowers creeping up a historic home in Jerusalem’s German Colony, I am preserving not only what has existed but also what could still exist.

Art in Israel doesn’t happen in isolation. It breathes in the street, the synagogue, the protest square, and the kitchen. It’s sacred, even when it’s defiant. And as I continue to find my place within this scene, I know I am not just painting pictures—I am adding to a conversation that began long before me and will outlive us all.

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Bonnie K. Goodman, BA, MLIS, is a historian, librarian, journalist, and artist. She is the author of “On This Day in History…: Significant Events in the American Year,” and “A Constant Battle: McGill University’s Complicated History of Antisemitism and Now Anti-Zionism.” She has a Diploma in Collegial Studies (DCS, DEC) from Vanier College in Communications: Art, Media, and Theater, specializing in the Fine Arts; a BA in History and Art History; and a Masters in Library and Information Studies from McGill University.

She has done graduate work in Jewish history at Concordia University as part of the MA in Judaic Studies and at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem as part of their MA in Jewish Education. She contributed to the “History of American Presidential Elections, 1789–2008,” edited by Gil Troy, Arthur M. Schlesinger, and Fred L. Israel (2012). She is the former features editor at the History News Network and reporter at Examiner.com, where she covered politics, universities, religion, and news. Her scholarly articles can be found on Academia.edu.