Mycelium
Neve Schechter Gallery
Recognition
2025 Psychedelics Design Winner
Best in Class Architectural & Space
About Architectural & Space
Celebrating architectural and design innovations in spaces, structures, and environments. From real-world applications to virtual worlds, how do you create safe, innovative spaces?
Credits
Title: Mycelium
Company: The Schecter Gallery
Entrant: The Schecter Gallery
Design Team:
Artist: Sharon Glazberg
Curator: Bar Yerushalmi
Space designer: Shay Id Alony
Sound designer: Nir Jacob Younessi
Lighting designer: Yair Vardi
Fungi consultant and cultivator: Alon Lahav
Description
In recent years, fungi have gained increasing international recognition, celebrated not only for their chemical attributes but also as models for inspiration across disciplines. Artists, scientists, and therapists engage deeply with fungi, forming attentive, interactive relationships that reveal fungi’s structural and communicative properties as a living system.
Sharon Glazberg’s artwork explores the intersection of art, environment, and community, employing mycelia—the intricate network of fungal threads (hyphae)—as both material and metaphor.
Through collaboration with mycelium, the gallery space became a habitat for edible and medicinal mushrooms. Curated with the help of experts in fields like therapy, creativity, philosophy, art, and music, this environment merges architectural innovation with the natural world. Audience members and patients arriving at the project space were offered sessions revolving around therapy, healing, art, and ritual, creating an immersive experience that reimagines safe and transformative spaces for collective growth and interspecies dialogue, where human and fungus interact as patient and therapist, feeder and sustainer, fostering relationships that invite care, reflection, and transformation.
Originally planned to launch in October 2023, the project coincided with the tragic events of October 7th in Israel and Palestine. Within days, it transformed from an art installation into a living, continuous therapeutic space. During the war’s initial weeks, the gallery provided the public with free access to a team of therapists who, in the presence of the mycelium, treated primary and secondary trauma. The space offered dozens of people daily a sanctuary for healing—a moment of peace and connection amid the devastating reality of war.
About The Schecter Gallery
Founded in 2015, The Schecter Gallery acts as a ligament between the immense body of knowledge of Judaism, and the expressive power of the arts. The incantatory phrase Abracadabra, which has its roots in Aramaic (אברא כדיברא), is the guiding light of our ongoing artistic interventions; we explore big ideas that unravel and shape the fabric of our lives through art. We strive to amplify the voice of otherness, and serve as a creative platform for artists from all walks of life to thrive and make their visions heard.
The active and intervenient role art plays in the reality of our lives, is foregrounded in the gallery’s activity and program. This core principle is expressed in the gallery’s cultivation of community ties, complemented by its initiation of events, such as lectures, workshops, and artist talks all based around the talmudic methodology of group learning.
Alongside its quarterly exhibition cycle, the gallery hosts a range of interdisciplinary programs for artists that work at the intersection of knowledge, art, and spirit.
