Most of my work is private: one family, one wall, one conversation. Creating Hope was the opposite. One word, 27 artists, and audiences who never chose to visit a gallery.

The brief: one word

Each of the 27 Israeli artists was asked to interpret the word hope. That is a generous brief and a hard one. There is no subject to hide behind and no client to satisfy. What came back was 27 different answers, and my job as curator was to bring them together so that the differences spoke to each other rather than cancelling out.

Three settings, three ways of seeing

• Across Israel. The exhibition traveled, so the same works were seen in different cities and different rooms. Every new venue is a new hang, and every hang is a fresh set of curatorial decisions.
• On billboards. The works were shown in public space, at the scale of advertising, to people on their way somewhere else. Art on a billboard has a few seconds to land.
• At the United Nations Offices in Geneva. Presented in Switzerland in June 2024, to an international audience in a diplomatic setting. The same works, read in a very different room.

Why this matters if you are a private client

Curating is the same discipline whether the room is a foyer in Caesarea or a room at the United Nations Offices in Geneva. You look at the work, you look at the space, you look at who will stand in front of it, and you decide what goes where and why. I learned that discipline through curatorial work in established museums and by managing an art gallery in Tel Aviv. Creating Hope asked for it at every scale at once, for audiences I could not brief in advance.

It also reflects how closely I work with Israeli artists, emerging and established. Knowing an artist's studio and pace from the inside is what lets me bring the right artist, on the right terms, into a private home.

To see how that plays out in a residence, look at the Caesarea sea view villa or the hospitality collections. To talk about a work by one of the artists, or about a commission, write to me.