The keychain Inbar Haiman made as a gift for her college roommate, Naomi Goldstein, contained standard elements, like a part-metal/part-thread chain. At the chain’s end lay a lime-green plastic knob that Haiman likely had pressed hundreds of times to make art. It was a nozzle from a spray-paint canister, the preferred tool of her trade. Haiman used spray paint to decorate items she found, like parts of discarded toys, then recycled them into art she sold as picture frames or earrings or keychains.
Haiman utilized spray-paint cans more conventionally, too, if such an adverb could apply to graffiti art. The genre appealed to Haiman because, as she told relatives and friends, it was accessible to everyone outdoors in the public domain, not only those paying to enter a museum.
Haiman also was “excited about the risk” of creating graffiti on public property, Goldstein said. “She liked that with graffiti, you could be appreciated and anonymous at the same time.”
Haiman dubbed herself “Pink Question,” for her favorite color and her curiosity — a moniker she shortened to “Pink.” That’s how she remains known. Haiman, 27, was among those abducted by Hamas in its October 7, 2023 rampage at the Nova music festival at Kibbutz Reim. She was later murdered by the terrorists, who still hold her body captive.
Haiman’s loved ones continue lobbying in Israel and overseas for her repatriation. Their efforts include spreading the message in a manner she’d likely have appreciated. It’s there — Free Pink, the graffiti reads in English — on boulders alongside Israel Railways tracks in the country’s north. On a highway wall, in English and Hebrew lettering, on Rte. 471 not far from Haiman’s parents’ home in Petah Tikva. Between shop entrances on Haifa’s busy HaAtzmaut Street, is a message apparently painted by her classmates at the WIZO Haifa Academy of Design and Education: RIP Pink: Rest in Paint. And plenty more places.
Art, in part, is what sent Haiman to the fateful festival. She brought at least three of her paintings to try to sell there. Goldstein and Haiman’s mother, Ifat, don’t know whether she succeeded or even if the works survived the massacre. Haiman also was drawn to Nova by the music and the dancing — and the chance to lend a hand. She was hired to work there as a “helper”: someone assisting those who weren’t feeling well, including those attendees who’d drunk, smoked or inhaled too much.
“She loved people without judgment. She touched so many people. She helped people,” said Ifat. Haiman once calmed a suicidal peer. While studying at WIZO, she volunteered at a Haifa high school, leading workshops in graffiti art and creative writing. While in the army, Haiman organized an open-microphone poetry night in Jerusalem for teenagers; it’s where she and Goldstein met.
“Inbar lived art every day,” Goldstein said.
WIZO lecturer Yael Barnea Givoni was impressed by Haiman’s final project in her second year. The assignment called for telling a five-part story in three dimensions. Haiman fashioned a five-member family out of spray-paint cans, buttons and other materials, using bright colors for their bodies and creative cuts of the metal for teeth to fashion distinct characteristics in a clan of what Barnea Givoni called “nice monsters.”
The project elicited Haiman’s “imagination and wildness,” she said. “She wasn’t tame. She was daring.”
Ifat remembers that her daughter began doing graffiti art with friends at about age 15. A few years later, she painted a pink question mark on a wall near home. Even in Haifa, she’d do graffiti late at night — alone or bringing someone along as a lookout. “It was a form of rebellion, of course,” Ifat said.
Haiman was preparing for a career in artistic branding, such as for a hi-tech company, Ifat said. Haiman and her boyfriend and WIZO classmate, Noam Allon, spoke of opening an art studio. The couple discussed marriage. Following Haiman’s murder, Allon dropped out of college and is travelling abroad.
Ifat misses her deep conversations with Haiman. They’d go for coffee, put down their phones and would “sit and talk and open our hearts,” Ifat said. “She wasn’t only my daughter. She was my friend. She told me her secrets. I’d sometimes reveal, too. That wasn’t to be taken for granted. We’d discuss everything.”
But Ifat didn’t know much about her daughter’s art until after Haiman’s death, when WIZO classmates brought her paintings and creations from Haifa. Some of it has since been displayed throughout Israel and even at the United Nations. Several students at WIZO — and at Ariel University and the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design — dedicated their graduate projects in Haiman’s memory.
“It brings attention to her, and brings back her light,” said Ifat. “It strengthens me.”
Writer-editor Hillel Kuttler can be reached at [email protected].
Read more at: Lives Lost: The Works of the October 7 Fallen – A Special Project
