Yangxingyue “Rita” Wang, who studied fine arts in her native China and is now earning her master’s degree in visual arts at New York University, also likes the cross-generational learning that Art Cart provides. She’s found she has more things in common with painter and sculptor Zigi Ben-Haim, who just turned 70, than she expected.Ben-Haim works in his spacious loft behind the anonymous door on a side street in the middle of Soho. There is more than one photograph of Albert Einstein in his studio, and — with his wild eyebrows and mustache — the artist somewhat resembles the great physicist, who counsels from a poster on the wall that “Imagination is more important than knowledge. For while knowledge defines all we currently know and understand, imagination points to all we might yet discover and create.”In fact, Ben-Haim has created his own world, quite literally: a globe of a world entitled “Zigiland.” And he still works like a madman to keep up with his creativity. “I’m in the studio every day by 8 a.m.,” he says, “and sometimes around midnight I complain that I have to stop working like I used to.”Sitting at a table that might easily accommodate eight, Ben-Haim reminisces about his travels. He was born in Baghdad and grew up in Tel Aviv before coming to the United States to study fine arts in San Francisco. He recalls standing in line for 25 minutes to get a very small loaf of bread in the Soviet Union. (He gave the bread to someone waiting behind him.) He also worked in Berlin, the only time in his life when he had a steady paycheck, because the government was giving him a stipend.On a tour of his studio, Ben-Haim stops before photograph of a tree and bench he had sculpted for Shimon Perez. The former Israeli Prime Minister had written a poem that was engraved on the seat.Ben-Haim says he appreciates how everyone involved benefits from Art Cart: “The artist has his work organized; the institution has a database of the art and the students get a great experience working with an artist.”When Wang created a stunning website to summarize her own work, she realized “I’m doing the same thing as Zigi, documenting what I have done in the past.” Not only that, “Working with Zigi has affected me positively,” she said. “Even at 70 he’s still creating. It’s a very big inspiration to me.”See full article at http://www.nextavenue.org/the-artists-legacy/