How Sliman Mansour and his colleagues built an art movement for Palestine
Sliman Mansour
Vera Tamari writes in Mondoweiss on 26 August 2026:
Hardly four years after the 1967 Six-Day War, I was stunned by the sudden appearance of a new group of visually striking and contextually strong paintings. The works were by a young artist from the West Bank town of Birzeit. There he stood on the side of the exhibition hall, a handsome, tall, red-haired man, talking humbly about his work. Perhaps few had heard of Sliman Mansour in those days, when he held his first solo exhibition at the East Jerusalem YMCA. But it was my first encounter with Sliman, with whom I would go on to build a long-standing friendship. We worked together alongside other artists to create a Palestinian art movement.
The colorful, large oil canvases in that East Jerusalem exhibition portrayed large, built women in traditional embroidered Palestinian thobes. They stood defiantly in a frontal stance, their heavy feet solidly planted in the earth, their large working hands carrying the crops of the land. The figurative subjects gave Sliman’s works a certain edge, but his sensitive brushwork and vibrant color schemes revealed the high artistry he continued to develop, making him one of the most defining modernist Palestinian artists.
Almost half a century since that first exhibition, Sliman Mansour passed away on August 24, 2026, at the age of 79. In those decades, Sliman was at the vanguard of the art movement and one of its central pillars. In the mid-1970s, he and a few other young fellow artists, most of them fresh art graduates, established the League of Palestinian Artists, the first official art body in occupied Palestine. With Sliman helming the League, voluntarily serving as its president on several occasions alongside other members, the art movement in Palestine gained unequaled momentum.
Being one of a few women members in the League did not deter me from being active and outspoken, although I often felt bypassed when the male members — with Sliman, of course — spent late-night social gatherings together, smoking away and enjoying time of merriment and camaraderie.