Artist Solomon Souza Wears a Coat of Many Colors

SOLOMON SOUZA (Hebrew: שלמה סוזה; born 1993) is a British-Israeli street artist. He is best known for spray painting portraits of contemporary and historical figures on the metal shutters of the Mahane Yehuda Market (“The Shuk”) in Jerusalem, turning them into an after-hours attraction.

Souza was born in London, and grew up in the neighborhood of Hackney. His mother, British-Israeli painter Karen (Keren) Souza-Kohn, is one of the three daughters of the Goan artist F. N. Souza, and Czech Jewish actress Liselotte Kristian (née Kohn). His grandfather F. N. Souza’s bestselling 1955 painting “Birth” depicts his grandmother Liselotte posing while pregnant with his mother Keren.

His younger sister Miriam is a filmmaker. He has been married to Ayelet Finkelstein since February 2021.

Largely self-taught, Solomon Souza has worked on murals since he was 14 years old.

As of July 2018, Souza had painted more than 250 of the 360 shutters in the Mahane Yehuda Market. Each painting takes two to four hours to complete. Souza usually completes three murals per night.

Subjects include contemporary and historical figures, including Yossi Banai, Roseanne Barr, Menachem Begin, David Ben-Gurion (painted upside-down), Albert Einstein, Mahatma Gandhi, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, Meyer Lansky, Emma Lazarus, Bob Marley, Matisyahu, Golda Meir, Moses Montefiore, Dona Gracia Nasi, Daniel Pearl, Jonathan Pollard, Naomi Shemer, Steven Spielberg, Hannah Szenes, Henrietta Szold, and Bracha Zefira. There are nearly one dozen rabbinical portraits, including Mordechai Eliyahu, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Yitzhak Kaduri, Maimonides, Shneur Zalman of Liadi, and Ovadia Yosef. Arab personalities are also represented, including Lucy Aharish, Sheikh Fari al-Jabari of Hebron, Si Ali Sakkat, and the Queen of Sheba. Biblical paintings include Moses, Solomon, and panels depicting the seven days of creation. Some of the early paintings are of the stall owners themselves, or their grandfathers, by personal request.

Other murals

Solomon Souza was invited in 2019 by Vivek Menezes, the special projects curator for the Serendipity Arts Festival in Goa, India to do a similar art project there. Souza created murals of various prominent Goans, past and present.

In January 2020, Chelsea FC unveiled a mural by Solomon Souza on an outside wall of the West Stand at Stamford Bridge stadium. The mural is part of Chelsea’s “Say No to Antisemitism” campaign funded by club owner Roman Abramovich. Included on the mural are depictions of footballers Julius Hirsch and Árpád Weisz, who were killed at Auschwitz concentration camp, and Ron Jones, a British prisoner of war known as the “Goalkeeper of Auschwitz.”

— Wikipedia

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