
Artist-teacher displays on life and work from seat of wheelchair
Yael Robin believes within the energy of artwork.
It says as a lot on her bio web page on the Israel Museum’s web site, and this lifelong artwork instructor has lived that adage since age 14, when she was sketching in her Jerusalem bed room to cope with the travails of teenage life.
Now 63 and grappling with Parkinson’s illness, Robin continues to {photograph} her topics and create artwork from these pictures.
A choice of Robin’s paintings is being proven in a personal gallery hooked up to the Israel Museum’s Youth Wing, the place the Jerusalem establishment’s artwork academics present their works to college students and pals. (Guests to the museum can ask to see the exhibit via mid-March.)
Robin taught artwork within the Israel Museum’s Youth Wing for 20 years to Arab and Jewish college students, older of us and wounded IDF veterans.
Her personal paintings typically begins with pictures she took capturing Israeli society, which she then cuts up and manipulates into collages that reconfigure the topic.

From artist and artwork instructor Yael Robin’s assortment ‘Land’s Finish,’ at present exhibited privately on the Israel Museum classroom wing, March 2023 (Jessica Steinberg/Instances of Israel)
The exhibit that opened in December begins with Land’s Finish, her assortment of collages in regards to the countless tug-of-war over Israel and its land.
A number of the collages embody photographs from a day spent years in the past with spiritual settlers visiting a military base on Independence Day, exhibiting young children clambering over military tanks and attempting out machine weapons, set in opposition to the background of Ramallah’s rooftops or with Israeli flags waving within the background.
Others embody Israeli buses after a bombing or bulldozers butting up in opposition to a police cruiser.
One other group of photographs are from the 2011 social justice tent protests in Tel Aviv,, when complete households camped out for weeks to show in opposition to the financial gaps in Israeli society.

From artist and artwork instructor Yael Robin’s assortment at present being exhibited on the Israel Museum classroom wing, March 2023. (Jessica Steinberg/Instances of Israel)
One portrait has satisfaction of place: a Lilliputian determine of a girl, her pocketbook clutched in her arms as she sits atop a mountain of sunflower seed shells, a ladder resting in opposition to the pile in case she needs to climb down.
Robin typically created installations, collages of her pictures combined with supplies to create miniature landscapes laid out on the flooring of galleries and museums.
It’s clear to see the place Robin’s work has been affected by her life partnership with Debbie Hill, an American-born photojournalist who has lengthy labored for worldwide information shops.
Robin would generally accompany Hill to her work assignments however whereas Hill was capturing the scenario happening, Robin’s work solely started along with her photographs.
“It’s like two totally different, completely totally different viewings of it,” stated Hill.

Photojournalist Debbie Hill (high) and artist Yael Robin, companions in life, particularly as Robin, a lifelong artwork instructor, offers with Parkinson’s Illness. (Courtesy: Debbie Hill)
“After I began slicing them with scissors, she was shocked,” stated Robin.
Robin’s photographs would come with the rubbish within the background or different parts that didn’t get included in Hill’s pictures of the identical scene.
“I might say, ‘Oh, all that grime, that’s going to mess up the photograph,’ whereas she threw the trash in as a result of it was actual,” stated Hill. “She noticed it as one thing necessary that needed to be in there.”
Moreover her work on the museum, Robin was an artwork instructor on the Leyada Secondary Faculty in Jerusalem, and he or she taught a weekly Thursday evening class for teenagers in danger at Zion Sq., creating artworks with anybody who confirmed up.
Hill stated the pair would stroll via the streets of town — they stay within the downtown Jerusalem neighborhood of Nahlaot — and stumble upon Robin’s college students, Palestinian youngsters she taught on the museum, at-risk teenagers who frolicked in Zion Sq., and college students from Leyada.
Educating artwork has all the time been as necessary as creating her personal paintings, stated Robin, who studied artwork at Beit Berl School in addition to within the Netherlands and London and has had dozens of reveals in Israel, together with on the Israel Museum itself.
“You need folks to see themselves as inventive, that’s the principle factor,” she stated. “You are taking a step again to view your actuality and also you view your actuality by drawing. After which you could have it perpetually.”
Robin stated that when she’s in artist mode, she’s a pupil herself.
Whereas her talents are extra restricted now that she is usually seated in a wheelchair or strolling with the assistance of a cane, with a left hand that shakes and doesn’t all the time do her bidding, Robin remains to be creating, taking photographs and drawing her impressions based mostly on these pictures.

Artist and artwork instructor Yael Robin displays on many years spent on her work, particularly as she struggles now with Parkinson’s illness, March 2023. (Courtesy: Debbie Hill)
She spends extra time at house, with fewer alternatives to see what’s occurring round her, and says she deeply misses the power to seize the moments and points which are necessary to her.
She additionally struggles with reminiscence and her mobility.
“I additionally see issues from a special stage,” she stated. “I’m sitting more often than not. And I’m wanting as much as my work.”
Requested if there are any advantages to the illness that has taken a lot from her, Robin isn’t able to reply.
“I need to say I don’t know but,” she stated.

