Education and Art – Adoption of an Elementary School by the Biennale as an Educational Model

The Haifa Mediterranean Biennale has adopted as its platform the importance of education in general and of art education in particular as one of the foremost parameters of activities in the field of art. In consequence, the Biennale has decided to adopt one of the town’s state primary schools, Fichman School in the Ramot Remez neighborhood, which is intended to serve as an educational model for enabling the integration of contemporary art in the regular state educational framework. This combination entails an inference that is opposed to the common wisdom that the domain of contemporary art is distant, elitist, and reserved only for the few. Contemporary art is relevant to the children’s lives, and is an accessible domain that can speak to them and offer them ideas that are close to their hearts, while being relevant to them and enabling them to express themselves by simple available means.

While working on preparing the exhibition, a series of meetings and talks by the exhibiting artists were held in the Fichman School. The artists showed the pupils their works and the diverse processes that artists undergo – from the conceptual idea to the realization of the work in the container.

The pupils, the teachers, and the school’s administrative staff found the talks and the direct meetings with the artists very interesting, and these had an influence on future plans to integrate various aspects and artistic media domains in the school’s educational syllabus.

One of the initiatives that are in the process of development in the school as a result of these meetings is a photographic documentary framework where the children examine their lives and those of their families. The children’s own working processes as a result of the talks and the meetings with the artists brought about a change in the general attitude toward contemporary art.

As a sequel to all this, a desire has arisen to open, in one of the regular classes of the school building, a contemporary art gallery where contemporary artists will exhibit their works and hold workshops and lectures, and where various projects on the subjects dealt with in the exhibitions will be carried out.

During the Biennale, the pupils’ works could possibly be exhibited side by side with those of well-known veteran artists in order to grant the children the benefit of being taken seriously and having their works respectably exhibited. This could encourage numerous students to promote the development of aesthetic sensitivity and to look for alternative means of expressing diverse ideas and situations through art.