Location: Umm El Fahem, Israel
Portrait of a Gallery Director
“The gallery's main goal is to be a home for Arab artists and Art and to create a meeting point for a meaningful dialogue between cultures.” -- Said Abu Shakra
Getting from Jerusalem to the Umm El Fahem Gallery ; a non- profit organization supported by funds from the Ministry of Education of the State of Israel, the local municipality, various foundations, private donations and contributions from local residents and the first Arab museum of contemporary art in Israel; has recently become a little easier. Several years ago to see the Palestinian art in Umm El Fahem, an Arab city working-class town of 45,000 just north of the West Bank, you would have to go to either Afula or Nazareth from Jerusalem and then take a bus to the Umm El Fahem Junction where, once you arrived, taxis infrequently passed by to take you up the Wadi to the gallery.
The visitor first spots the gallery by the caravan of metal camels, leading up a flight of steps to the bright blue front door. Once inside you are greeted by the multi-floored gallery of contemporary Arab art with spaces for lectures; art reach education; and an archive of photos, documents and interviews about the town’s history and particularly its elders. The gallery has become an important social and cultural meeting place. The creative workshops, seminars, gallery talks, symposiums, and the many art exhibitions have turned it into a place in the local and international culture scene, featuring anything from retrospectives on local artists like Sharif Waked and Abed Abdi to international events like a Yoko Ono show in 1999, an annual ceramics symposium, and a 2009 joint exhibition of German, Jewish and Palestinian artists.
Umm El Fahem, the vision of Said Abu Shakra, a painter and art school graduate himself and former police officer in Jerusalem, has been in operation for twenty successful years. It is Abu Shakra’s dream to build a Museum of Contemporary Arab Art. He has the architect’s plans which he achieved through an open competition of architects from the Arab world and Israel. Shakra hopes the winning museum plans, designed by the Israeli architect Amnon Bar or, will showcase his culture’s heritage and contemporary talent.
One of the most exciting and an important aspects of the gallery is the archive of oral history narratives and photography which began as the exhibit Shadows of Time: Photographic Documentation of the Elders of Wadi ‘Ara, 2007-2012. This archive and the exhibition are a unique and very important record of an historic period and place soon to vanish. It is Wadi Ara’s story of “life, about the wandering journey, about survival and about belonging to the past and the land. “ The archive contains life stories which have yet to be translated into English as well as a photographic record of a generation that has passed away. Photographers Shai Aloni, Ammar Younes, Wijdan and Khaled Abu Fa’our contributed to the project during 2007-2012. From hundreds of interviews, professors and students from the Open University documented, through oral storytelling, portraits of people around the age of 80: Palestinian-Israelis, Muslim Arabs, citizens of the Jewish state, most of who had lived in Wadi Ara before 1948.
Abu Shakra feels that it is his duty, role and job to preserve and nurture his city and culture’s art for the present and the future.
Watch the videos below and listen to Said Abu Shakra’s vision past, present and future for art in Umm El Fahem.
And visit the gallery’s site and source for this article: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/23/arts/23iht-rartisrael23.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0