Tel Aviv Museum of Art

The Tel Aviv Museum of Art was established in 1932 in a building at 16 Rothschild Boulevard that was the former home of Tel Aviv’s first mayor, Meir Dizengoff, who had donated the property for a museum in memory of his wife, Zina, following her death in 1930.

On 14 May 1948, 250 delegates quietly gathered at the museum for the historic signing of the Israeli Declaration of Independence.

In 1971, the building became Independence Hall when the museum relocated to 27 Shaul Hamelech Boulevard.

In 2018, the museum set an all-time attendance record with 1,018,323 visitors, ranking 70th on the list of most visited art museums. In 2019, the museum set a new attendance record, ranking 49th with 1,322,439 visitors.  In 2022, it again ranked 49th, with 1,070,714 visitors. In 2023, it was ranked 48th on The Art Magazine‘s list of the 100 most popular museums in the world.

On 23 March 2023, Tel Aviv Museum of Art was partially closed, in participation with Israel’s “day of paralysis” during the 2023 Israeli judicial reform protests. Following the 7 October attacks and subsequent incidents related to the Israel-Hamas War, the Israel–Hezbollah conflict (2023–present) and the 2024 Iran–Israel conflict, the museum removed several items on its collection from display and stored them for safekeeping in a secured basement. It also moved other exhibitions to a protected space on the facility’s lower levels.