About
MoBY is a small and ambitious museum and a cultural and learning center that serves the community in which it is located. Our team specializes in facilitating conversations about contemporary art with diverse populations, promoting public art projects, and developing art education programs for children, teens, and adults.
Bat Yam Museum was established in 1961 as a museum of modern art.
In the first decades of our activity, the museum was an important exhibition venue for local modern art, focusing on painting and sculpture. From its early days, the museum showed an active involvement in the city’s life. At the time it displayed excellent Bat Yam artists like the sculptor Jacob Epstein and the painter Chaim Kiewe, and the nearby water tower housed an artists’ studios complex for the city’s artists and creatives.
In 2007, the museum reopened as a museum for contemporary art under the name MoBY – Museums of Bat Yam. MoBY’s inaugural exhibition Video Marina, curated by Milana Gitzin-Adiram, was displayed that year on the north edge of Bat Yam’s Promenade, marking the museum’s return to the city’s public sphere and the life of its residents.
Since then, the round and intimate space of the museum featured dozens of solo and group exhibitions of the finest contemporary Israeli artists; ambitious solo shows dedicated to the creative vision of one artist, and group exhibitions that bring together the work of emerging and established artists, looking at a common theme from different perspectives. Notable artists whose work was displayed at the museum in recent years include Eliyahu Fatal, Ruti Sela, Shahar Yahalom, Avi Sabah, Yael Burstein, Eitan Ben Moshe, Michal Helfman, and Anna Yam.
In addition to our contemporary art exhibitions, the museum also runs two cultural houses that celebrate the work and collections of two great artists – the novelist Sholem Asch and the artist Issachar Ber Ryback.
Sholem Asch House has been a house for literature and culture since 1962. Asch, one of the luminaries of Yiddish literature in the 20th century, planned and designed the house, where he lived from his arrival in Israel in 1955 to his death in 1957. In 2019, after an extensive and complex restoration work, the Sholem Asch House reopened to the public. The house displays Asch’s unique collections while serving as a cultural center for literary events, exhibitions, and writing workshops.
Established in Bat Yam in the 1960s as the only museum in the world dedicated to the work of renowned Jewish painter Issachar Ber Ryback, and as a private residence for his widow Sonia, today Ryback House serves as the museum’s art education center. It offers art workshops for children and adults, as well as a workshop for unstructured creative work that serves the area’s residents.
The house is currently in the stages of planning towards its renovation and reopening as a museum that displays the world’s largest collection of Issachar Ber Ryback’s artworks.
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