Siona Shimshi
1939–2018 · Israeli painter, sculptor and ceramist
Siona Shimshi (Tel Aviv, 1939 – Tel Aviv, 2018) was an Israeli artist who worked in painting, sculpture, ceramics and textile design. Her career unfolded in the decades after the founding of the State of Israel, when a generation of artists trained locally moved toward practices that crossed between media.
Born in Tel Aviv in 1939, she was the daughter of parents who had emigrated from Lithuania to Mandate Palestine in 1933. She studied at the Avni Institute in Tel Aviv from 1956 to 1959, with Avigdor Stematsky, Yehezkel Streichman and Moshe Mokady, and then trained in ceramics at Alfred University in New York and at the Greenwich House Pottery in New York City.
In 1965 she co-founded the "10+ Group" with Buky Schwartz, Raffi Lavie and other artists. From 1979 to 1987 she headed the Ceramic Design Department at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem, where she also taught as a professor. Her public commissions include a wooden work at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, a wall hanging at the Tel Aviv Hilton and a portrait of Natan Alterman on the facade of Tel Aviv City Hall. In 1988 she received the Arie El Hanani Prize for her sculpture in Goren Goldstein Park in Tel Aviv.
She died in Tel Aviv in 2018, aged 79, and was buried at Yarkon Cemetery.