Arad Lookout

The story

At the end of the Moab promenade, at the place where the ridge ends and the view opens onto the Judean Desert, the Dead Sea and the mountains of Moab, stands an environmental sculpture by Yigal Tumarkin. It was inaugurated in 1968 and it is among the earliest of the ten environmental sculptures that Tumarkin managed to erect in the 1960s and 1970s. Tumarkin raised the funding from the Ministry of Housing, which in those years budgeted works of art in the new cities and neighborhoods it established, and the rest was completed by donations of the residents of the city. The sculpture is built of a rounded slab tilted on its side, from which various bodies grow, all of it exposed concrete. At a later stage it was painted, on the initiative of a resident of Arad, in blue and white, with Tumarkin's approval. The weapons that had been incorporated into it were taken. A narrow path links the central part with a second part that Tumarkin created about two hundred meters into the desert, with a table in it and concrete seats around it. The lookout returned in Tumarkin's own work: it appears in “Self-Portrait 1975”, a series of five prints each of which is dedicated to another sculpture of his. In 2013 it appeared on a stamp issued by the Philatelic Service for fifty years of Arad, designed by Zina and Tzvika Roitman. In 2018 the Center for Contemporary Art in Arad presented the exhibition “Jubilee of the Arad Lookout”, curated by Hadas Kedar, with works in it made under its inspiration.

• Public art
• Architecture and planning
• Arad