Palestinian artist Sliman Mansour, one of the defining figures of contemporary Palestinian art, has died at 79 after a long illness, his family announced on Monday.
For more than five decades, Mansour painted Palestine through its people, landscapes and memories. Olive trees, village homes, embroidered dresses and Jerusalem became more than subjects in his work — they became symbols of identity, loss, resilience and a homeland that could never simply be forgotten.
Who Was Sliman Mansour?
Born in Birzeit in 1947, Mansour studied Fine Art at Jerusalem’s Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, graduating in 1970.
He emerged in the 1970s alongside a generation of Palestinian artists determined to create a visual language rooted in their own history and surroundings.
Mansour found beauty and meaning in everyday Palestinian life: farmers working the land, women in traditional dress, village homes and the landscapes around him.
He wasn’t simply painting what Palestine looked like. He was painting what it meant to remember it.
Painting Palestine
Mansour’s work often sits somewhere between realism and symbolism. His figures are solid and dignified, while familiar objects carry much bigger meanings.
The olive tree became a symbol of land and continuity. Traditional embroidery connected his figures to heritage. Jerusalem represented both belonging and longing.
His paintings made ordinary scenes feel monumental — because preserving those scenes was, in its own way, a way of preserving a people and their memory.
The Painting That Carried Jerusalem
In 1973, Mansour created Camel of Hardship, one of his most famous works.
It depicts an elderly porter carrying Jerusalem on his back, with the city appearing almost impossibly heavy.
The image came to represent sumud, or steadfastness: the determination to keep going despite displacement, occupation and loss.
Reproduced widely as posters and prints, it became one of the most recognisable images in Palestinian art.
And Jerusalem would keep returning throughout Mansour’s career and often as something carried through memory.
Art Became Resistance
Mansour wasn’t only making art about Palestine. He was also helping build the cultural spaces that would allow Palestinian art to survive and grow.
He helped establish the League of Palestinian Artists, serving as its leader from 1986 to 1990, and later helped establish the Al-Wasiti Art Center in East Jerusalem.
He also played a role in founding the International Academy of Art Palestine.
His work made a powerful point: resistance did not always have to look like confrontation.
A farmer working his land.
A woman wearing a thobe.
A village continuing its daily life.
For Mansour, simply remaining rooted could become an act of resistance.
When Even the Colours Became Political
Mansour’s experience with censorship became especially clear in 1980, when an exhibition featuring his work alongside Nabil Anani and Issam Badr at 79 Gallery in Ramallah was shut down by the Israeli army just three hours after opening.
Two weeks later, the three artists were summoned and warned against creating political paintings. According to Mansour, they were told that even painting the Palestinian flag — and even using its colours — was forbidden.
The conversation took an almost surreal turn when Issam Badr asked what would happen if he used the same red, green, black and white colours to paint a flower instead.
The response was just as telling:
“It will be confiscated. Even if you paint a watermelon, it will be confiscated.”
The watermelon would later become one of the most recognisable symbols of Palestinian resistance, precisely because its colours mirror those of the Palestinian flag.
For Mansour and his generation, it was a reminder that the struggle wasn’t only over what artists were allowed to paint. It was over the symbols, colours and cultural memory they were allowed to put on a canvas.
When Artists Boycotted Their Materials
During the First Intifada, Mansour co-founded the New Visions collective with Vera Tamari, Tayseer Barakat and Nabil Anani.
The artists boycotted Israeli-made art supplies and began working with materials they could find locally, including mud, henna, straw, wood and natural pigments.
Mansour became particularly associated with mud, layering it onto wooden structures and allowing it to crack as it dried.
The material itself became part of the message.
The land wasn’t simply being represented on the canvas. It was physically becoming part of the artwork.
Resistance Could Be Quiet
Some of Mansour’s most powerful works don’t show conflict directly.
In Desert Melodies (1977), two Palestinian women in traditional dress appear in a barren landscape, one playing the flute.
In The Rising (1977), a woman emerges from a map of historic Palestine, surrounded by symbols of Palestinian life, including traditional clothing, homes, Old Jerusalem and a rifle.
Together, these works reveal another side of Mansour’s idea of resistance: it could also mean making beauty, preserving traditions and simply continuing to live.
A woman playing music. A farmer harvesting. A village carrying on.
The everyday could become extraordinary when survival itself was at stake.
A Career That Kept Evolving
Mansour continued painting Palestine throughout his life, with the landscape — particularly the olive tree — remaining central to his later work.
His art entered major collections and institutions around the world, including Mathaf in Doha, the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris, the Jordan National Museum, Barjeel Art Foundation and The Palestinian Museum.
He received major honours, including the Grand Nile Prize at the Cairo Biennial and the UNESCO-Sharjah Prize for Arab Culture.
But his legacy wasn’t limited to the paintings. He spent decades teaching, organising and creating spaces for Palestinian artists, helping make sure the story could continue beyond his own canvas.
Even His Final Years Became Part of the Story
Mansour continued visiting his studio even as his health declined.
By 2023, the war in Gaza was also changing the way he painted. He began working more directly and abstractly, trying to process images he found almost impossible to put into words.
“All the images that come to my mind are really horrible. Some I can’t get out of my mind – I can only get them out through painting. ”
It was a fitting final chapter for an artist who had spent his life doing exactly that: taking memory, grief, beauty and resistance and giving them a form that could endure.
What Sliman Mansour Leaves Behind
Mansour leaves behind much more than famous paintings.
He helped create a visual vocabulary through which generations of Palestinians could see their land, traditions and history reflected back at them.
He turned the olive tree into a symbol, Jerusalem into something that could be carried, and everyday Palestinian life into an act of remembrance.
For more than five decades, his paintings insisted that a homeland could live in a landscape, a piece of embroidery, a familiar face or a story passed from one generation to another.
Palestine could be remembered, represented and carried forward.
And perhaps that is Mansour’s most enduring work of all.
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