Migration With Pomegranate
Aithan Shapira is a first-generation Israeli-American, born in New Jersey, USA to an Iraqi-Jewish mother and a Jewish father descended from ten generations in Jerusalem. He studied at the Royal College of Art, London, the Bezalel Academy, Jerusalem, and Boston University, and spent three years working with Aboriginal Australians, studying the art of survival and of preservation. Prevalent themes in his work include migration, place-making and way-finding and his art has been described as characterized by layers of contradictions including the use of materials ranging from concrete to soap and mixing his own pigments from scratch using materials including earth, ash, and limestone. He currently lives with his wife and daughter in Boston, where he teaches at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts and runs an intensive drawing course at MIT. He has also lectured at Harvard and is a recipient of the Daler-Rowney Drawing Prize. In 2012, he delivered a TED talk entitled “We Are All Cubists”, in which he explored multiple perspectives and the way we view both history and the present.
