Ramat Gan Museum of Israeli Art is dedicated to Israeli contemporary art. The museum seeks to connect the local audience to art in diverse media. It strives to offer a dynamic, social, and accessible space that encourages the integration of the community, making it an involved, active partner.
Exhibitions focus on fundamental, topical issues pertaining to local-Israeli society, culture, and space, as well as on universal themes, which are at the heart of the contemporary discourse, addressing them with a critical eye. Alongside these, the museum features historical tribute and research exhibitions.
As a leading cultural institution committed to the promotion of Israeli art, Ramat Gan Museum aims to cultivate it locally and internationally, and to serve as a platform enabling in-depth discussion and a link between art and social involvement. Great importance is placed on developing a multicultural dialogue in a desire to establish common spaces of equality which will embrace the diversity of cultures and identities in Israel.
Ramat Gan Museum of Israeli Art was founded in 1987. It is located on one of the city's main arteries, which borders the banks of the Yarkon River, in an industrial building constructed in the 1930s, which over the years housed various factories and workshops. Its unique shape is due to the plot on which it was built—an acute triangle, formed by the intersection of two historic roads. Its modernist architectural style was typical of residential and industrial buildings in those years. In 1983, the building passed into the ownership of the Ramat Gan Municipality, and the following year the city council decided to establish a museum of Israeli art and an association headed by Deputy Mayor, Hanan Rosen. Upon its establishment and under the management and vision of Meir Ahronson, the museum's founder and first curator, its identity was solidified as the only museum in Israel dedicated to Israeli art.
The museum's location in the heart of the Hanan Rosen Museum Campus—which also houses the historical studios of artists Aharon Kahana, Nathan Rapoport, Kosso Eloul, and Joseph Constant, built in the 1950s on the outskirts of Shikun Vatikim—realizes the vision of the city's first mayor, Avraham Krinitzi, to develop Ramat Gan's art quarter in this area. The museum's collection contains over 2,500 works in a variety of media. Focusing on Israeli art throughout the generations, it includes works by leading veteran artists as well as contemporary artists.
In 2017, the building's expansion and renovation project, headed by Efrat-Kowalsky Architects, began at the initiative of the Ramat Gan Municipality. The museum reopened at the end of 2021, and since 2023 it has been under the leadership of Ran Guetta as CEO and Sari Golan as Chief Curator. In 2024, four artists' pavilions—Kahana House, Rapoport House, Constant House, and Kosso Eloul House, which are part of the Ramat Gan Museums, along with the Museum of Far Eastern Art and the Museum of Russian Art, located in another area of the city—will be inaugurated in the Museum Campus. All together will operate under the overall management of the Museum of Israeli Art.
As part of the curatorial perception and vision outlined by the chief curator, Sari Golan, the museum is actively planning to establish and strengthen its relations with the urban, artistic, cultural, and social space locally and internationally, while concurrently reinforcing the ties with the public and the community through ongoing dialogue, social interactions, and collaborations.
