By: Tabetha Cunningham
We started Sunday morning with a South Tel Aviv graffiti tour in the Florintine district. Shirel and her friend Guy took two separate groups to see a wide variation of diverse and beautiful graffiti art. My guide, Guy, is a linguist who uses graffiti and signage to teach Hebrew in a way that incorporates cultural context. I thought it was a really unique idea. We treaded through narrow dirty alleyways and streets with loud industrial sounds and funky smells – but it was totally worth it to view the fantastic artwork. 
There is such a variation of flat, blended and 3D graffiti on the little shops and textile workshops. We discussed gentrification and demolition in the area and how it might act as an advantage to the artists. All of the people that we met were very friendly as we moved from residential areas to textile areas. We ended the tour and met the bus in a very nice residential playground.
Next we traveled to Holon to see the Israeli Center for Digital Art and the Holon Center for Visual Art. I’m not sure what the distinction is, but all together it was very impressive. We started in the Fablab, where we viewed some information on the center. when we walked in, I noticed that many of the objects including tables, chairs and lights pendants were fabricated in the center. I loved the concept behind their display cases! We learned about their open concept community center where the students are the catalysts. The center was formed in an Ethiopian immigrant neighborhood and it helps a lot of the children have a safe space. There is a gymnasium turned into a make/play center which contains an awesome community fabricated club house for the children with various activities and materials. We also had a chance to visit the museum and view the current exhibition which was about military issues. It contained a particularly interesting piece created from pieces of olive branches that looked like a missile. We ended this tour with a group picture in front of one of the centers murals. This was a very unique blend of professional and nonprofessional people working together in a community and I thoroughly enjoyed our time there.
When we left the center, we traveled to Ashdod. On our way, Avi talked about how the sand dunes were in the area and how they are created from the counterclockwise rotation of the Nile River that deposited the sand in the region. We stopped at a high end strip mall to eat. There was very little shade but I relaxed next to a fountain and read during my little bit of down time.
We then traveled to the Ashdod Museum of Art, which kind of looks like the Louvre. It is a very clean and bright museum with many smaller rooms. We viewed the exhibition on non-Western Jewish music. I and some of the others found the amount of diverse sounds created by the mixture of various live performances on screens to be overwhelming and had to often take breaks in more quiet places. The exhibit contained screens with live performances, album covers, instruments, and posters. I did not find this as relevant to me, but I know there are musicians and dancers in the group that probably did.
After the tour ended, we viewed two presentations from an art educator and an art therapist. We had a really good Q&A session afterwards about using some of their methods in our classroom- more so probably about art therapy.
After the Q&A sessions, we proceeded to the underground Green Submarine experience that included a vary well planned and executed children’s program that taught them how to recycle trash to art. It included some interactive arcade type games that many of the group did not want to leave.
We ended the evening in Jerusalem with a very nice dairy kosher Italian dinner. The food was fantastic, and the company and service were excellent! I walked with a group back to the hotel. It was very manageable and the weather was perfect!