Art & Culture

Remembering Sliman Mansour, the Man Who Painted Palestine Into Collective Memory

BYKhaoula Ghanem

August 25, 2026

Palestine has lost one of the great keepers of its memory. Sliman Mansour, the pioneering Palestinian artist whose work gave shape to a homeland that occupation has spent decades trying to erase, died on Aug. 24 at the age of 79 in Jerusalem, his family announced Monday. No cause of death has been publicly disclosed. “The final chapter has been written,” his family said in announcing his passing, adding that he leaves behind “a life filled with beauty, memory, and a legacy that will continue to live through all those he touched.”

Born in Birzeit in 1947, one year before the Nakba displaced hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, Mansour grew up between Birzeit, Bethlehem, and Jerusalem. He later studied at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem, although financial difficulties forced him to leave before graduating. By the early 1970s, he was already exhibiting alongside other Palestinian artists and developing the visual language that would define much of his career.

It is difficult to overstate Mansour’s place in Palestinian visual culture. For more than half a century, Mansour painted Palestine as something that could be carried, remembered, and returned to. That language was deeply Palestinian without ever needing a flag painted across the canvas to announce itself. Mansour returned again and again to olive trees, orange groves, stone terraces, Jerusalem, traditional embroidery, and Palestinian women. The symbols carried specific histories. Orange trees recalled the Palestinian lands lost during the Nakba, olive trees spoke to the land occupied in 1967 and to a relationship with the soil that long preceded occupation, while Tatreez placed Palestinian history directly onto the bodies of his figures. Women, frequently monumental in scale, became mothers, protectors, and personifications of the homeland.

His most famous painting would make that idea of carrying Palestine literal. Created in the 1970s, Jamal Al Mahamel, commonly translated as Camel of Hardships or Camel of Burdens, depicts an elderly barefoot Palestinian man bent beneath the weight of Jerusalem, which is tied to his back with rope. Above him sits the Dome of the Rock, glowing against the city he carries. The work became an icon of Palestinian art, and of the strange, painful condition of carrying home with you when you cannot freely live in it. A defining image of modern Palestinian art, it was reproduced as posters from the mid-1970s and displayed across homes and public spaces in the West Bank and Gaza.

The image remains devastating because the burden is also precious. The man strains beneath Jerusalem, yet he does not put it down. Mansour understood that displacement could produce this strange relationship to home: the farther away it is pushed, the more fiercely it is carried.

In 1973, he co-founded the League of Palestinian Artists and later served as its head. Palestinian artists working under occupation faced censorship, confiscation, and restrictions on exhibitions. Mansour recalled Israeli authorities forbidding artists from using the colors red, green, black, and white together because they evoked the Palestinian flag. Even painting a flower in those colors, artists were told, could result in its confiscation.

During the First Intifada, that repression helped push Mansour toward one of the most radical periods of his career. Alongside Vera Tamari, Nabil Anani, and Tayseer Barakat, he helped establish the New Visions collective. Inspired by Palestinian calls for economic self-sufficiency and boycott, the artists stopped relying on Israeli art supplies and began experimenting with materials taken from their own surroundings: mud, clay, henna, coffee, straw, wood, and other natural materials. He was no longer simply making work about Palestinian land; Palestinian earth could become part of the work itself. Mud cracked as it dried, giving physical form to fragmentation while remaining, quite literally, a piece of the land from which it came.

His contribution also stretched beyond his own studio. Mansour co-founded Jerusalem’s Al-Wasiti Art Center in 1994 to support, exhibit, and preserve Palestinian art and to connect artists inside Palestine with those living in exile. He taught at Palestinian cultural and educational institutions, including Al-Quds University, and was a founding board member of the International Academy of Art Palestine. His work would eventually travel to exhibitions around the world, from the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris to the Sharjah Biennial, and in 2019 he received the UNESCO-Sharjah Prize for Arab Culture.

Mansour died as Gaza continues to endure the catastrophic consequences of war and Palestinians across the occupied territories face displacement, destruction, and mounting threats to cultural heritage. In recent years, he had spoken about how the devastation in Gaza was changing his own relationship to making art. Yet he continued working, including on a monumental clay mural for the Palestinian Museum that revisited the ideas first explored through New Visions decades earlier.

Mansour’s death leaves a void far beyond the art world, because his work belonged to Palestinians as much as it did to galleries and museums. His paintings became part of how generations saw, remembered, and carried Palestine, particularly those who knew their homeland from afar. Sliman Mansour spent his life painting a Palestine that could not be erased and, in doing so, made himself part of its memory forever.

Below, we look back at some of our favorite works from the artist’s extraordinary career.

Palestinian Family, 2013

Palestinian Family turns the Holy Family into something unmistakably rooted in contemporary Palestine. Mary wears an embroidered Palestinian dress, while the child at the center is draped in a keffiyeh. It is a particularly beautiful example of how Mansour allowed ancient and modern Palestinian histories to occupy the same image. Bethlehem, family, faith, dress, and the keffiyeh exist together without contradiction.

Camel of Hardships, 1974

There is a reason this became Mansour’s defining image. Known in English as The Camel of Hardships, it depicts an elderly Palestinian man bent beneath the weight of Jerusalem strapped to his back. What makes the painting endure is the ambiguity of its weight. Jerusalem is clearly a burden, but it is never presented as one the man wishes to abandon. He carries it because it is his. Few images have captured the Palestinian experience of displacement so simply.

From the River to the Sea, 2021

Olives and oranges belong to Mansour’s recurring vocabulary. Oranges evoke the Palestinian coastal lands and towns lost during the Nakba, while the olive tree became associated in his work with the land occupied in 1967. Here they grow from the same trunk, bringing different chapters of Palestinian dispossession into one living organism. And then there is the embrace itself. The woman in the painting is not standing beside the land or looking out over it. She is physically holding onto it, and it appears to hold her in return.

Mother’s Day, 1986

In this painting, Mansour turns one of his most enduring subjects, the Palestinian mother, into an image of extraordinary tenderness. There is something especially moving about the scale of the mother here. She takes up almost the entire canvas, her body becoming shelter, while her hands seem deliberately too large for ordinary proportions. Mansour often used the Palestinian mother as a symbol of the homeland, and that idea feels particularly clear here. She holds the child in the same way his paintings so often depict Palestinians holding onto their land: closely, instinctively, as though letting go has never been an option.

Remembering Sliman Mansour, the Man Who Painted Palestine Into Collective Memory

Palestinian Family, 2013

Camel of Hardships, 1974

From the River to the Sea, 2021

Mother’s Day, 1986

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Remembering Sliman Mansour, the Man Who Painted Palestine Into Collective Memory

Palestinian Family, 2013

Camel of Hardships, 1974

From the River to the Sea, 2021

Mother’s Day, 1986

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