Art on Ha-Atzmaut

The story

A painted wall along the fence of the Southern Command camp on Ha-Atzmaut Street, opposite the museum compound in the Old City. Its length is about fifty-six meters and its height about three meters, and it runs from Allenby Garden in the east to the end of the Museum of Islamic and Near Eastern Cultures in the west. The wall was painted by Avi Tal, who signs his works with the name Spine B7, and Natan Sigal Atabayev, who signs with the name Sabres. The painting joins street style and classic graffiti to realistic styles and to contemporary art, and along it are figures and motifs after well-known artists — Dalí, Picasso, O'Keeffe, Kahlo, Escher, Kusama, Neshat, Kadishman, Thomas and Van Gogh. This is the largest and most continuous section in the street art scene of the Old City, which has grown around Ha-Atzmaut Street and the lanes beside it; in the winter of 2022 and in the spring of 2023 the Negev Museum of Art accompanied it with a series of guided tours and with the exhibition “In the Public Domain” curated by Nirit Dahan. A wall painting is a perishable asset: a wall is repainted, erased or replaced, and the record of a street work is measured against what stands in the field on the day someone goes and looks.

• Street art
• Beersheba