Before returning to her native Israel after 27 years in New York, Edna Fast sold her real estate management and consulting business and used some of the proceeds to establish a project combining her love for art and her belief in equal opportunity in education.
She named her non-profit private family fund Luna Art Fund (“LunArt”) after her oldest grandchild, and in 2009 began offering a free college prep course for Arab-Israeli high school graduates with a creative bent who need professional help in preparing an art portfolio and improving their Hebrew in order to increase their chances in the competitive college admission process.
“I chose to concentrate on the Arab-Israeli sector because the number of students in academic creative departments like the visual arts, architecture, fashion design, photography, industrial design, film, even art therapy, was really underrepresented,” says Fast, an attorney by training.
She discovered that Arabs comprise about 3.5 percent of students in art-related college-level studies, though this population represents 25% of 18- to 25-year-old Israeli citizens. Officials at the Ministry of Education and art teachers confirmed her suspicion that art education in the Arab sector is an extremely low priority. It is now her mission to improve that situation.
“My basic premise is that creativity is a God-given talent, and by providing this stop-gap prep course, those who really aspire to a career in visual arts would have a better chance.”
Art ambassadors
LunArt’s 21-week, tuition-free pre-academic course was piloted at Minshar Art School in Tel Aviv. After three years, the Shenkar College of Engineering and Design received funding from the National Lottery to adopt the LunArt program as its own.
With central Israel covered, Fast then began another three-year cycle of courses at Oranim College of Education in the Lower Galilee up north. The plan is for a public body to take over this initiative as Shenkar did in the Tel Aviv area, helping to provide a cadre of art instructors for Arab schools in the Galilee. Once the Oranim program is spun off, LunArt would next set its sights on the Negev.
“The point is to sow the seeds in an incubator and establish a successful model that would be adopted and funded by a public or governmental body,” says Fast.
Graduates of the LunArt course who gain admission to an academic program afterward must agree to come back and tutor students in the next session. Students who don’t gain admission are required instead to run a small art project in their own community.
So far, nearly half of the 70 graduates have been admitted to academic art and design programs in Israel.
“Those who finished and were not admitted can try again the next year, but even if they decide not to try again we don’t consider them a failure,” Fast stresses. “On the contrary, they were enriched by the course, and they can be art ambassadors and art consumers in their communities.”
Through LunArt, Fast brought an Arab-Jewish photography exhibition, Jaffa Mosaic, to the United States in partnership with the Inter-Agency Task Force on Arab Israeli Issues. The show consists of the fruits of a workshop completed by 12 Arab and Jewish women from the mixed city of Jaffa.
Since 2010, Jaffa Mosaic has been traveling to Jewish community centers in cities including New York, Washington, Philadelphia, Las Vegas, Ann Arbor and Atlanta. “Jaffa Mosaic puts a face on the fact that there are mixed cities in Israel, and we can provide a culture bridge to those communities,” Fast says.
LunArt created a Facebook page in Arabic to encourage networking among students who participated in its prep courses. Next year, an exhibition of photography by three female LunArt graduates is planned at Hadassah College in Jerusalem.
Tool for identity formation
Fast and her husband, a professor of medicine, are art collectors. They are also the proud parents of two sons and grandparents of four.
“I have a soft spot for art because our older son is a successful video artist, and our encouragement to him to try for an art career has made us shift gears and try to do it for others as well,” says Fast, whose younger son is a psychiatrist.
“We are trying to include more Arab-Israeli art in our own collection, and trying to empower those who are gifted to achieve their dream of becoming professional artists or art educators,” says Fast, who today provides half the funding for LunArt and raises the rest from donors.
She is also introducing creativity-building programs to younger students. A workshop for Arab-Israeli school principals in the Galilee will explain the importance of art education and various opportunities for employment, and introduce the free course at Oranim. Printed and online materials will be provided to high school counselors in the Arab-Israeli sector.
“Arab-Israelis are still struggling to form an identity of their own, and art is one way for them to find a personal language regardless of stereotypical thinking in their communities,” says Fast. “We give them tools for identity formation and self-expression that may not otherwise be readily available or accessible.”