Zahara's Chronology
Written By: Eva Wardi
Zahara Schatz was born in Jerusalem 1916 (then Turkish governed Palestine) to Professor Boris Schatz (1866-1932) and Doctor Olga (b. Pevsner, 1881-1971). Zahara Schatz had a brother, painter Bezalel Schatz (1912-1978) and a half-sister from her father’s first marriage. Boris Schatz was born in Vorna, Lithuania and Olga Schatz in Mogilev, Belarus, then the Russian Pale of Settlements.
Zahara’s father Boris Schatz founded the first Israeli Academy of arts, Bezalel School of Arts and Crafts, in 1906 and also established The Bezalel Museum, which was later on incorporated into The Israel Museum.
The strong enthusiastic spirit of the Bezalel School in the early years affected Zahara Schatz’s life profoundly. Boris Schatz was usually characterized as a very optimistic person who was never willing to give up a plan or a dream without trying to realize it. This positive approach to life remained as a basic value in Zahara Schatz’s later career.
The Hebrew type iconography and motives were one of Boris Schatz’s main objectives in establishing Bezalel. He stressed the importance of an original style in order to change the Diaspora identity of the Jews; a Hebrew identity.
Hebrew - became a major theme that characterized Zahara Schatz’s nature and carried her views all through her career. During those early years of changes and difficulties at Bezalel School there was also a great joy for creating and for expressing the various talents of individuals and this joy came to encourage and strongly affect the artists’ future life.
As a child, in the 1920s, Zahara Schatz often visited the Bezalel School and already then found some of the themes that still structure and contextualize her compositions.
The school closed in 1928 for lack of funds.
1930s
After her fathers’ death, in 1932, Zahara moved to Paris, France to study at the Academie de la Grande Chaumiere and the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Arts Decoratifs, where she graduated in 1937. After graduation she worked on the Palestine Pavilion at the Paris Exposition. During the 1930s Zahara Schatz practiced various techniques such as: drawings, water colours, and linoleum cuts.
In 1938 Zahara Schatz and her brother Bezalel organised a series of exhibitions of the works of their father, Boris Schatz, and of their own work throughout the U.S.
Because of World War II Zahara Schatz ended up staying in the U.S., Initially in California, and later in New York, designing jewelry and teaching art at a Jewish Center in L.A.
Later she moved to San Francisco, and taught art at the San Francisco Labour School where she started experimenting with laminated plastic as art form. Living in California, Zahara Schatz also utilized California and Santa Fe New Mexico views. She worked with water colours and oil. At that time Zahara injured her right hand which prevented her from drawing with it and she was obliged to reveal the expressive use of the left hand. She described how the situation affected her water colour period of San Francisco area's visual themes and portrayed a certain new relief in expression. This use of both hands had an even deeper mental affect on her expressive way of thinking that remained throughout her future work.
She had a one-man show of her oil painting at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1944 and of water colours in Santa Fe in 1946. During this period of time Zahara Schatz experimented and created more and more new ways of expressive techniques, becoming interested especially in plastic as a transparent medium. As she describes: " It seemed to me that the medium was not being approached properly. Artists frequently try to use old techniques on a new medium. I tried to discover the possibilities within the medium itself".
The special discovery occurred during experimenting with the laminated plastic, as some dust particles were blown between the two pieces of plastic. Studying the haphazard formation of the particles, Zahara Schatz realized the infinite range of possibilities that could be created. Such installations and compositions embedded various elements including copper wire, fragments of silk and dry pigments of colours and metals and various organic elements and included thin lines as motives that were to be used as collages or as examples for window panes, free standing screens, light deflectors and for lamps with translucent surfaces.
At that time Zahara Schatz created plates, bowls and table tops, jewelry made of plastic with bits of iron fillings, scrapes of copper chips and numerous assortments of odds and ends filling between the two pieces of free-form Plexiglas. In 1947 she moved to New York. There she developed a model for a lamp made of plastic with built in lighting in which the current-carrying wire was used as an element of design. The base was formed of two Plexiglas sheets between which bits of coloured metal were arranged together with the copper wire stripped of its insulation.
This lamp received the Honorable Mention in 1949 at the American Institute of Decorators and in two years time she also received the Award of the New York Museum of Modern Art for a lamp produced commercially.
From the very beginning, the abstract collages of Zahara Schatz were considered an ultra-modern art form. She collaborated with many architects. Zahara Schatz co-worked in interior design and for some period of time in industrial design and for commercial purposes. She also made several graphic designs for book covers when she returned to Israel.
During the 1940s Zahara Schatz had five one-man shows, a series of group exhibitions, and several displays in The San Fransisco Museum of Art (1944), the Santa Fe Museum (1946), The Pinachotheca Gallery in New York (1947), and the Philadelphia Art Alliance. She also participated in the group-shows, some of which were in San Francisco Museum of Art, Los Angeles Museum of Art, the Museum of Non-Objective Art in New York, Acron Art Insitute, Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, The Guggenheim Museum, Addison Gallery, The Detroit Insitute of Art and many others.
1950s
Zahara Schatz returned to Israel at the beginning of the 1950s. For a few years she worked as the Industrial Design consultant for the Ministery of Commerse and Design of Israel, in Jerusalem, promoting the use of modern designs by craftsmen working with their traditional techniques. At that time The Ministery of Labour encouraged new immigrants to work in their traditional crafts.
During this era she supervised many small craft workshops, including those of new immigrants and organised an exhibition of the work of Israeli craftsmen at the Triennale Crafts World Fair held every three years in Milano, Italy, in which Israel was rewarded 28 prizes.
After returning to Israel, Zahara expanded her work in Plexiglas, a thermoplastic material (metyl methacrylate) which is molded through heat and then retains its shape. The material conducts light and reflects colours in exquisite transparencies. She expanded the use of the material for smaller sizes. The murals and screens were transparent with sometimes a metallic pigment: bronze and gold or aluminium powders and a selection of small metal pieces and wires or dried leaves, ferns, grass and texture. She used a collage technique for various designs or texture to be laminated. Sometimes the design structure was cemented to the Plexiglass before lamination. While the plastic is hot it can be shaped by hand or by mold into various pieces: bowls, plates, trays or lamp bases. With lamination complete the item must be filed, scraped, buffed and trimmed. Filing prepares the surface for the final polishing and the edges must always be straight and square. Held at a right angle and drawn across the Plexiglas it removes a thin shaving, leaving a smooth surface. The process is not completely controlled and a collage may create spaces of its own in the lamination and the textures and depth give a composition and unexpected new dimension of quality. Also, a composition of bent plastic and brass tubing never become static since they may be set in three or four positions independent of the light shining through or reflecting within, which becomes an integral part of the composition that creates a very sensitive use of light and space. To create the collages and compositions the artist used many materials, both metals as threadlike silver wire and strips of thin sheeting, tin or aluminium, copper brass, and steel.
Zahara Schatz, from the very beginning of her plastic works, had also been involved with natural forms of leaves including - dried thorns and delicate flowers from Israel, and elm, poplar aspen, oak, and maple in the colours of spring, summer and fall gathered from the New York countryside (some carried from New Mexico later). She pressed them between the pages of telephone books for a translucent look, attaining the effect of non industrialized forms and stressing the hand made touch on the collage which balanced and responded to light.
In 1948 Zahara Schatz received the Prize for Lamp Design from the American Decorators Institute in New York and in 1952 the Prize of The Bezalel Museum in Jerusalem. In 1954 she received a Gold Medal from the Triennale in Milano, Italy, in 1955 the prestigious Israel Prize and in 1959 the Dizengoff Prize in Tel Aviv.
In the 1950s, besides the metal in plastic compositions, Zahara Schatz rediscovered her early kinetic sculptures. There were sculptures of various materials including aluminium, brass wire, wood, and plastic that sat and moved upon a point of balance or ones balanced by a circular or tubular counterweight affixed to metal at a central point. These mobiles appeared in the mid 1950s: Zahara Schatz: "In kinetic sculptures I use the metal without welding which creates a more dynamic sculpture, something with life in it. I am looking for the aesthetic experience in space. When it is static I try to integrate movement. You change the angle and the object changes in space and creates an illusion of continuity. In kinetic sculptures the weight is not in the body of the sculpture but precisely in the space between the bars, i.e. the air is a factor in exerting the pressure trapped within the body. When the kinetic sculpture wheel moves by wind or the touch of a hand, an organic balance is created. The technical movement looses this illusion of continuity that is why I prefer wind and organic movement".
At the beginning of the 1950s the artist participated in group shows including The Guggenheim Museum (2 exhibitions), YMCA in Boston, Cooper Union Museum New York, Travelling exhibition organised by the American Federation and New Israeli art exhibition in Haifa, Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.
In 1951 and 1952 the artist participated in group shows at Mikra Studio in Tel Aviv and in 1953 at the Tel Aviv Museum under the exhibition name, "The Three Schatzes" with her brother and his wife. In 1951 she had a one-man show at the Bertha Shaeffer Gallery in New York and in the Orphan Gallery at Berkeley and in 1955 displayed Abstract and Surrealist Paintings in Bezalel Museum in Tel Aviv. In 1958 she participated in the Bienale in Venice and Ein Harod Art Center. From 1958 to 1960 she participated in the travelling exhibition of contemporary art to Athens, Bern, Stockholm, Oslo, Helsinki, Milano and Cologne.
1960s
Working with techniques in new materials, there were both judaica items, mostly made of plastics and metal compositions of certain jewish themes, such as: Eye and Hand, Menorah but also the works of Jewish themes carried by the Jewish ideas and symbols into the abstract shape. The Star of David, made in 1978 was created from one rod bent in space.
Zahara Schatz: "Abstract sculpture made of solid brass, gold plated or other material define the interior spaces to create a series of geometeric triangular forms which form a particular perspective, the integrated lines form the Star of David, representing the universal symbol of the Jewish People. The Hebrew letter 'lamed' carved in the base corresponds to the number 30 in the Hebrew numerical system commemorating the 30th anniversary of the State of Israel".
In 1960 Zahara Schatz won the competition to design the Memorial Light at the Yad Vashem Museum in Jerusalem that she herself describes, "It is lit on the memorial day of the holocaust, the 27th of Tishrey. This was done in the memory of the six million who perished in the holocaust. The lamp is made of the combination of the six poles of aluminum which create a column starting on the earth and going up in the spiral form and on the top of it creating a shape of the crown of six lights standing forward up and the lamp is there to symbolize the growth and the continuity of the spirit of the Jewish nation and the crown is center of light which comes to represent the hope and the continuity of the Jewish people".
Zahara married in the 1960s to the well-known sculptor Franz Sandow and moved to Berkeley, California where she lived with her husband, until his death in 1976.
In 1967 she and her husband exhibit in The Orphan Gallery in Berkeley. Zahara had a one-man show in The Artists House in Jerusalem. She also participated in several group shows abroad, New Israeli Art in Haifa, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Form aus Israel in Cologne, in The National Museum of Modern Art in Paris, in 1955-65 in Venice Biennale Italy, 1956’Art in movement’ in Tel Aviv Museum and 1969-70 Travelling exhibition of Contemporary Art organised by Bertha Urdang in major cities in the USA.
1970s
During the 1960s and 1970s Zahara Schatz continued developing her established techniques for kinetic sculptures.
She made small models or installations in compositions of wood, wire, and stone or plastic and sculptures of various materials. She also used multiple materials for collages of bottles, tiny glistening beads, dots and other small objects on the surface of the item surface changing it into another formation.
At that time she also made murals following the idea titled ‘Burning Bush’ in order to be placed on the wall of a building at the Hebrew University and another at Bank Leumi in Manhattan.
The mural in the Manhattan bank demonstrated quite another technique. The Mural is a Map of Israel constructed to Scale. The artist manipulates five layers of transparent Plexiglas to suggest the elevation of the mountains and to give depth and dimension. She uses mesh and wire to indicate topography and specific places with accuracy. The mural is impressionistic yet a native of Israel can immediately point out and recognize specific places.
At this period she also created murals for interior design projects, which shows the effective use of plexiglass in an architectural scheme. The mural, nineteen feet long and four feet high, made for the bar in Warwich House at Atlantic City. Zahara Schatz never prefered sketches on paper, for her sculptures: "For sculptures I do not make sketches on paper because the third dimension changes as the angle changes".
Other works are in "Zim" Company Ships, in a Hotel in Liberia, in a Hotel in Abidzan (Ivory Coast), in Dan Carmel Hotel in Haifa, in Synagogue - Kibbutz Chefets Haim, in several Israel Trade Pavilions, Memorial Light at Yad Vashem at various Faires, in the El Al Office in London and in many private homes.
In 1978 Zahara Schatz exhibited at the American-Israeli Cultural Foundation in New York. The mid 1970s is a personally difficult period for the artist because of the continuing and severe illness of her husband which ended up having an effect on her own art.
At that time she develops a new mixed drawing technique expressing an insight of a psychological search for the change in human organism that she describes: "Improvisations influenced by world chaos and slow death. Visually life is movement; death is static. In kinetic sculptures, one has to study not only the shape (created by the rod) but the space shape that is created around the rod".
In 1978 Zahara exhibited in New York and then returned to Israel.
1980s
Zahara Schatz moved back to her childhood home in Jerusalem where she has since lived and has a studio where she concentrates mainly on kinetic sculptures. In the 1980s the artist participated in several group shows including, the 1984 "Cross Section" Jerusalem Artists House, 80 years Israeli Sculpture in The Israel Museum, 1985 Exhibition of Israeli Artists in Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Salon de Beaux Art in Grand Palais - Paris, France, 1986 at Jerusalem Artists House, 1987 Jerusalem Paintings, Alliance Francaise in Jerusalem and in the 1989 Israel Art Week Israel Festiva in Jerusalem Theater. She exhibited also in a one-man show in Debel Gallery in Ein Karem in Israel.
Her kinetic sculptures are represented in Hadassah Hospital, Ein Kerem in Jerusalem, in a Secondary School in Jerusalem, in a Public Garden in Katamon, Jerusalem, in a Public Garden in Tel Aviv, in Hebrew University in Jerusalem and in K.R.B. Foundation in Jerusalem. At that time she also made a stage design for a play. From 1986 she headed the Committee for Art Exhibitions of the Israeli Artists Union and was also active on other art committees.
1990s
In recent years Zahara Schatz has mostly been involved with improving and developing her kinetic sculptures of plastic, wood, and metal. In 1990 she recieved the Distinguished Citizen Prize of The Bezalel Academy, in 1991 the Shoshana Ish Shalom Life Achievement Award and in 1992 the Distinguished Citizen Prize of the City of Jerusalem. She participated in several group shows including "The Artist Decides" (1992), the ’Light in Jewish Tradition’ in The Jewish Museum in Frankfurt, monuments in Jerusalem Theater and more.
In 1996 Zahara Schatz is planning to participate in the group exhibition in Helsinki, Finland.
Zahara's Chronology
Written By: Eva Wardi
Zahara Schatz was born in Jerusalem 1916 (then Turkish governed Palestine) to Professor Boris Schatz (1866-1932) and Doctor Olga (b. Pevsner, 1881-1971). Zahara Schatz had a brother, painter Bezalel Schatz (1912-1978) and a half-sister from her father’s first marriage. Boris Schatz was born in Vorna, Lithuania and Olga Schatz in Mogilev, Belarus, then the Russian Pale of Settlements.
Zahara’s father Boris Schatz founded the first Israeli Academy of arts, Bezalel School of Arts and Crafts, in 1906 and also established The Bezalel Museum, which was later on incorporated into The Israel Museum.
The strong enthusiastic spirit of the Bezalel School in the early years affected Zahara Schatz’s life profoundly. Boris Schatz was usually characterized as a very optimistic person who was never willing to give up a plan or a dream without trying to realize it. This positive approach to life remained as a basic value in Zahara Schatz’s later career.
The Hebrew type iconography and motives were one of Boris Schatz’s main objectives in establishing Bezalel. He stressed the importance of an original style in order to change the Diaspora identity of the Jews; a Hebrew identity.
Hebrew - became a major theme that characterized Zahara Schatz’s nature and carried her views all through her career. During those early years of changes and difficulties at Bezalel School there was also a great joy for creating and for expressing the various talents of individuals and this joy came to encourage and strongly affect the artists’ future life.
As a child, in the 1920s, Zahara Schatz often visited the Bezalel School and already then found some of the themes that still structure and contextualize her compositions.
The school closed in 1928 for lack of funds.
1930s
After her fathers’ death, in 1932, Zahara moved to Paris, France to study at the Academie de la Grande Chaumiere and the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Arts Decoratifs, where she graduated in 1937. After graduation she worked on the Palestine Pavilion at the Paris Exposition. During the 1930s Zahara Schatz practiced various techniques such as: drawings, water colours, and linoleum cuts.
In 1938 Zahara Schatz and her brother Bezalel organised a series of exhibitions of the works of their father, Boris Schatz, and of their own work throughout the U.S.
Because of World War II Zahara Schatz ended up staying in the U.S., Initially in California, and later in New York, designing jewelry and teaching art at a Jewish Center in L.A.
Later she moved to San Francisco, and taught art at the San Francisco Labour School where she started experimenting with laminated plastic as art form. Living in California, Zahara Schatz also utilized California and Santa Fe New Mexico views. She worked with water colours and oil. At that time Zahara injured her right hand which prevented her from drawing with it and she was obliged to reveal the expressive use of the left hand. She described how the situation affected her water colour period of San Francisco area's visual themes and portrayed a certain new relief in expression. This use of both hands had an even deeper mental affect on her expressive way of thinking that remained throughout her future work.
She had a one-man show of her oil painting at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1944 and of water colours in Santa Fe in 1946. During this period of time Zahara Schatz experimented and created more and more new ways of expressive techniques, becoming interested especially in plastic as a transparent medium. As she describes: " It seemed to me that the medium was not being approached properly. Artists frequently try to use old techniques on a new medium. I tried to discover the possibilities within the medium itself".
The special discovery occurred during experimenting with the laminated plastic, as some dust particles were blown between the two pieces of plastic. Studying the haphazard formation of the particles, Zahara Schatz realized the infinite range of possibilities that could be created. Such installations and compositions embedded various elements including copper wire, fragments of silk and dry pigments of colours and metals and various organic elements and included thin lines as motives that were to be used as collages or as examples for window panes, free standing screens, light deflectors and for lamps with translucent surfaces.
At that time Zahara Schatz created plates, bowls and table tops, jewelry made of plastic with bits of iron fillings, scrapes of copper chips and numerous assortments of odds and ends filling between the two pieces of free-form Plexiglas. In 1947 she moved to New York. There she developed a model for a lamp made of plastic with built in lighting in which the current-carrying wire was used as an element of design. The base was formed of two Plexiglas sheets between which bits of coloured metal were arranged together with the copper wire stripped of its insulation.
This lamp received the Honorable Mention in 1949 at the American Institute of Decorators and in two years time she also received the Award of the New York Museum of Modern Art for a lamp produced commercially.
From the very beginning, the abstract collages of Zahara Schatz were considered an ultra-modern art form. She collaborated with many architects. Zahara Schatz co-worked in interior design and for some period of time in industrial design and for commercial purposes. She also made several graphic designs for book covers when she returned to Israel.
During the 1940s Zahara Schatz had five one-man shows, a series of group exhibitions, and several displays in The San Fransisco Museum of Art (1944), the Santa Fe Museum (1946), The Pinachotheca Gallery in New York (1947), and the Philadelphia Art Alliance. She also participated in the group-shows, some of which were in San Francisco Museum of Art, Los Angeles Museum of Art, the Museum of Non-Objective Art in New York, Acron Art Insitute, Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, The Guggenheim Museum, Addison Gallery, The Detroit Insitute of Art and many others.
1950s
Zahara Schatz returned to Israel at the beginning of the 1950s. For a few years she worked as the Industrial Design consultant for the Ministery of Commerse and Design of Israel, in Jerusalem, promoting the use of modern designs by craftsmen working with their traditional techniques. At that time The Ministery of Labour encouraged new immigrants to work in their traditional crafts.
During this era she supervised many small craft workshops, including those of new immigrants and organised an exhibition of the work of Israeli craftsmen at the Triennale Crafts World Fair held every three years in Milano, Italy, in which Israel was rewarded 28 prizes.
After returning to Israel, Zahara expanded her work in Plexiglas, a thermoplastic material (metyl methacrylate) which is molded through heat and then retains its shape. The material conducts light and reflects colours in exquisite transparencies. She expanded the use of the material for smaller sizes. The murals and screens were transparent with sometimes a metallic pigment: bronze and gold or aluminium powders and a selection of small metal pieces and wires or dried leaves, ferns, grass and texture. She used a collage technique for various designs or texture to be laminated. Sometimes the design structure was cemented to the Plexiglass before lamination. While the plastic is hot it can be shaped by hand or by mold into various pieces: bowls, plates, trays or lamp bases. With lamination complete the item must be filed, scraped, buffed and trimmed. Filing prepares the surface for the final polishing and the edges must always be straight and square. Held at a right angle and drawn across the Plexiglas it removes a thin shaving, leaving a smooth surface. The process is not completely controlled and a collage may create spaces of its own in the lamination and the textures and depth give a composition and unexpected new dimension of quality. Also, a composition of bent plastic and brass tubing never become static since they may be set in three or four positions independent of the light shining through or reflecting within, which becomes an integral part of the composition that creates a very sensitive use of light and space. To create the collages and compositions the artist used many materials, both metals as threadlike silver wire and strips of thin sheeting, tin or aluminium, copper brass, and steel.
Zahara Schatz, from the very beginning of her plastic works, had also been involved with natural forms of leaves including - dried thorns and delicate flowers from Israel, and elm, poplar aspen, oak, and maple in the colours of spring, summer and fall gathered from the New York countryside (some carried from New Mexico later). She pressed them between the pages of telephone books for a translucent look, attaining the effect of non industrialized forms and stressing the hand made touch on the collage which balanced and responded to light.
In 1948 Zahara Schatz received the Prize for Lamp Design from the American Decorators Institute in New York and in 1952 the Prize of The Bezalel Museum in Jerusalem. In 1954 she received a Gold Medal from the Triennale in Milano, Italy, in 1955 the prestigious Israel Prize and in 1959 the Dizengoff Prize in Tel Aviv.
In the 1950s, besides the metal in plastic compositions, Zahara Schatz rediscovered her early kinetic sculptures. There were sculptures of various materials including aluminium, brass wire, wood, and plastic that sat and moved upon a point of balance or ones balanced by a circular or tubular counterweight affixed to metal at a central point. These mobiles appeared in the mid 1950s: Zahara Schatz: "In kinetic sculptures I use the metal without welding which creates a more dynamic sculpture, something with life in it. I am looking for the aesthetic experience in space. When it is static I try to integrate movement. You change the angle and the object changes in space and creates an illusion of continuity. In kinetic sculptures the weight is not in the body of the sculpture but precisely in the space between the bars, i.e. the air is a factor in exerting the pressure trapped within the body. When the kinetic sculpture wheel moves by wind or the touch of a hand, an organic balance is created. The technical movement looses this illusion of continuity that is why I prefer wind and organic movement".
At the beginning of the 1950s the artist participated in group shows including The Guggenheim Museum (2 exhibitions), YMCA in Boston, Cooper Union Museum New York, Travelling exhibition organised by the American Federation and New Israeli art exhibition in Haifa, Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.
In 1951 and 1952 the artist participated in group shows at Mikra Studio in Tel Aviv and in 1953 at the Tel Aviv Museum under the exhibition name, "The Three Schatzes" with her brother and his wife. In 1951 she had a one-man show at the Bertha Shaeffer Gallery in New York and in the Orphan Gallery at Berkeley and in 1955 displayed Abstract and Surrealist Paintings in Bezalel Museum in Tel Aviv. In 1958 she participated in the Bienale in Venice and Ein Harod Art Center. From 1958 to 1960 she participated in the travelling exhibition of contemporary art to Athens, Bern, Stockholm, Oslo, Helsinki, Milano and Cologne.
1960s
Working with techniques in new materials, there were both judaica items, mostly made of plastics and metal compositions of certain jewish themes, such as: Eye and Hand, Menorah but also the works of Jewish themes carried by the Jewish ideas and symbols into the abstract shape. The Star of David, made in 1978 was created from one rod bent in space.
Zahara Schatz: "Abstract sculpture made of solid brass, gold plated or other material define the interior spaces to create a series of geometeric triangular forms which form a particular perspective, the integrated lines form the Star of David, representing the universal symbol of the Jewish People. The Hebrew letter 'lamed' carved in the base corresponds to the number 30 in the Hebrew numerical system commemorating the 30th anniversary of the State of Israel".
In 1960 Zahara Schatz won the competition to design the Memorial Light at the Yad Vashem Museum in Jerusalem that she herself describes, "It is lit on the memorial day of the holocaust, the 27th of Tishrey. This was done in the memory of the six million who perished in the holocaust. The lamp is made of the combination of the six poles of aluminum which create a column starting on the earth and going up in the spiral form and on the top of it creating a shape of the crown of six lights standing forward up and the lamp is there to symbolize the growth and the continuity of the spirit of the Jewish nation and the crown is center of light which comes to represent the hope and the continuity of the Jewish people".
Zahara married in the 1960s to the well-known sculptor Franz Sandow and moved to Berkeley, California where she lived with her husband, until his death in 1976.
In 1967 she and her husband exhibit in The Orphan Gallery in Berkeley. Zahara had a one-man show in The Artists House in Jerusalem. She also participated in several group shows abroad, New Israeli Art in Haifa, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Form aus Israel in Cologne, in The National Museum of Modern Art in Paris, in 1955-65 in Venice Biennale Italy, 1956’Art in movement’ in Tel Aviv Museum and 1969-70 Travelling exhibition of Contemporary Art organised by Bertha Urdang in major cities in the USA.
1970s
During the 1960s and 1970s Zahara Schatz continued developing her established techniques for kinetic sculptures.
She made small models or installations in compositions of wood, wire, and stone or plastic and sculptures of various materials. She also used multiple materials for collages of bottles, tiny glistening beads, dots and other small objects on the surface of the item surface changing it into another formation.
At that time she also made murals following the idea titled ‘Burning Bush’ in order to be placed on the wall of a building at the Hebrew University and another at Bank Leumi in Manhattan.
The mural in the Manhattan bank demonstrated quite another technique. The Mural is a Map of Israel constructed to Scale. The artist manipulates five layers of transparent Plexiglas to suggest the elevation of the mountains and to give depth and dimension. She uses mesh and wire to indicate topography and specific places with accuracy. The mural is impressionistic yet a native of Israel can immediately point out and recognize specific places.
At this period she also created murals for interior design projects, which shows the effective use of plexiglass in an architectural scheme. The mural, nineteen feet long and four feet high, made for the bar in Warwich House at Atlantic City. Zahara Schatz never prefered sketches on paper, for her sculptures: "For sculptures I do not make sketches on paper because the third dimension changes as the angle changes".
Other works are in "Zim" Company Ships, in a Hotel in Liberia, in a Hotel in Abidzan (Ivory Coast), in Dan Carmel Hotel in Haifa, in Synagogue - Kibbutz Chefets Haim, in several Israel Trade Pavilions, Memorial Light at Yad Vashem at various Faires, in the El Al Office in London and in many private homes.
In 1978 Zahara Schatz exhibited at the American-Israeli Cultural Foundation in New York. The mid 1970s is a personally difficult period for the artist because of the continuing and severe illness of her husband which ended up having an effect on her own art.
At that time she develops a new mixed drawing technique expressing an insight of a psychological search for the change in human organism that she describes: "Improvisations influenced by world chaos and slow death. Visually life is movement; death is static. In kinetic sculptures, one has to study not only the shape (created by the rod) but the space shape that is created around the rod".
In 1978 Zahara exhibited in New York and then returned to Israel.
1980s
Zahara Schatz moved back to her childhood home in Jerusalem where she has since lived and has a studio where she concentrates mainly on kinetic sculptures. In the 1980s the artist participated in several group shows including, the 1984 "Cross Section" Jerusalem Artists House, 80 years Israeli Sculpture in The Israel Museum, 1985 Exhibition of Israeli Artists in Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Salon de Beaux Art in Grand Palais - Paris, France, 1986 at Jerusalem Artists House, 1987 Jerusalem Paintings, Alliance Francaise in Jerusalem and in the 1989 Israel Art Week Israel Festiva in Jerusalem Theater. She exhibited also in a one-man show in Debel Gallery in Ein Karem in Israel.
Her kinetic sculptures are represented in Hadassah Hospital, Ein Kerem in Jerusalem, in a Secondary School in Jerusalem, in a Public Garden in Katamon, Jerusalem, in a Public Garden in Tel Aviv, in Hebrew University in Jerusalem and in K.R.B. Foundation in Jerusalem. At that time she also made a stage design for a play. From 1986 she headed the Committee for Art Exhibitions of the Israeli Artists Union and was also active on other art committees.
1990s
In recent years Zahara Schatz has mostly been involved with improving and developing her kinetic sculptures of plastic, wood, and metal. In 1990 she recieved the Distinguished Citizen Prize of The Bezalel Academy, in 1991 the Shoshana Ish Shalom Life Achievement Award and in 1992 the Distinguished Citizen Prize of the City of Jerusalem. She participated in several group shows including "The Artist Decides" (1992), the ’Light in Jewish Tradition’ in The Jewish Museum in Frankfurt, monuments in Jerusalem Theater and more.
In 1996 Zahara Schatz is planning to participate in the group exhibition in Helsinki, Finland.