TMIM focuses on textiles produced between the 1940s-1990s in different sites including an art academy, a craft organization, industrial factories and the fine art world, challenging the separation between the artistic, artisanal and commercial realms. The first part of this research the New Bezalel School of Art and Craft, that operated between 1941-1970, and directed by German-born weaving designers Julia Keiner (founder and director, 1941-1963) and Ruth Kaiser (director, 1963-1970). While Keiner and Kaiser remain entirely overlooked in accounts of Israeli art and design, I argue that they shaped perceptions of textile design that persisted in Israel until at least the late twentieth century and thus contributed significantly to the development of a quintessential Israeli aesthetics. TMIM's second section focused on textiles production in Maskit, a government organization founded founded in 1953 to develop sources of income for immigrants through home industries. Previous studies of Maskit focused on appropriation and adaptation of traditional motifs. Little scholarly attention has been paid to Maskit’s role in the development of Israel’s modern art-craft and art-textiles in particular. My research investigated Maskit's departments for handweaving printed textiles and the textile exhibitions in Maskit's gallery. I considered Maskit’s shift from traditional- to art-craft during the 1960s-1970s within the context of to Israel’s socio-economic circumstances as well as new ideas about craft that developed in the international arena. TMIM’s third section examines the production of textiles made on the boundary between art, craft and design between the 1970s-1990s. Based on this research, I concluded that there existed a direct link between the New Bezalel, Maskit and the emergence of Israeli fiber art in the 1970s, which lead from early experimentation with functionalist design based, to later exploration of fibers as an artistic medium. This trajectory resulted from the unique circumstances that existed in Israel: first, like in the United States and Australia, Central European emigres who fled Nazi Europe in the 1930s had significant impact on local textile production resulting in new notions reflecting transnational links; second, despite of Israel’s large textile industry, commercial textile design remained a marginal field until the 1980s, leading designers trained in applied textiles to work in alternative fields such as home industries, modern craft and non-functional art textiles; third, Maskit’s involvement with the World Craft Council and the International Studio Craft Movement was significant in the early institutionalization of textiles as an art medium, demonstrating again the amalgamation of local and global streams on this field of practice; and fourth, between the 1970s-1990s, fiber art became a thriving field continuing both the New Bezalel and Maskit initiatives, and absorbing international ideas from newly arrived immigrants. The field Israeli textile art and design was stirred almost exclusively by women, who operated mostly outside Israel’s central art. Consequently, they have remained completely overlooked and forgotten, reflecting biases against the field of textile as “amateurish” and “feminine.” Nevertheless, this study shows that this group of artists shaped a significant modernist aesthetic language in their medium, in tune with major international development in the field of textile, while deeply rooted in local socio-cultural circumstances.
