Sliman Mansour Palestinian, 1947-2026

Sliman Mansour was among the most prominent figures in Palestinian modern art.

His work has shaped the visual language of Palestinian identity and resistance to Israeli military occupation, influencing generations of artists and activists.

Born in Birzeit, Palestine, Mansour grew up surrounded by its green hills and fields before spending his adolescence in Bethlehem and Jerusalem, where he later studied at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design. His early connection to these places, and the changes brought by the 1967 occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, would remain central to his work.

Mansour drew on Palestinian landscapes, traditions, and everyday life to develop a visual language grounded in realism and symbolism. Olive trees, stone houses, traditional embroidery, and views of Jerusalem recur throughout his paintings, becoming familiar signs of a people's attachment to their land. His best-known painting, Jamal al-Mahamel (Camel of Hardship, 1973), portrays an elderly porter carrying Jerusalem on his back. The image became an emblem of the Palestinian struggle. During the First Intifada, Mansour co-founded the New Visions movement, which rejected Israeli art supplies in favor of local materials, including mud, straw, coffee, and henna. In these works, the land was no longer represented; it became part of the artwork itself.

Mansour exhibited widely across the Middle East and Europe and received the Grand Nile Prize at the Cairo Biennale in 1998, followed by the UNESCO-Sharjah Prize for Arab Culture in 2019. His influence extended beyond his paintings through his involvement in Palestinian cultural institutions and his commitment to art as a form of resistance. Across more than five decades, Mansour helped establish an artistic vocabulary through which Palestinians could see their history, their struggle, and their relationship to the land.