Sliman Mansour

Sliman Mansour was born on 27 July 1947 in Birzeit, north of Ramallah, in Mandatory Palestine, one year before the Nakba. He was the fourth of six children. His father died when Sliman was four. His mother enrolled him and his siblings in an Evangelical Lutheran boarding school for orphans in Bethlehem, where a German art teacher, Felix Theis, recognized his gift and opened European art history to him. Summers and family time returned him to Birzeit's olive hills and springs. With his maternal grandmother, Salma, a potter, he mixed mud and hay for beehives and ovens. Those childhood materials would later become his materials of resistance.

He studied at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem from 1967 to 1970. Major sources including Wikipedia and The National describe him as graduating in 1970; other accounts note he left after three years under financial pressure, and Bezalel itself did not award bachelor's degrees until 1975. What is secure is the training: drawing and painting under teachers such as Yossi Stern and Joseph Hirsch, and a deliberate turn away from abstract expressionism toward a realist language rooted in Palestinian daily life. After leaving the academy he helped build exhibitions across Palestinian cities, and Israeli authorities began closing shows, confiscating works, and forbidding the colors of the Palestinian flag.

In 1973 he painted the work that would define a visual century of Palestinian memory: Jamal al-Mahamel, known in English as The Camel of Hardships (also Camel of Hardship / Camel of Burdens). An elderly porter walks through an empty expanse, Jerusalem and the Dome of the Rock balanced in an eye-shaped load on his back. Reproduced as a poster, the image entered homes, camps, and political magazines. Mansour later painted further versions (including 1976 and 2005). He co-founded the League of Palestinian Artists in the early 1970s and served as its head from 1986 to 1990. Cartoons and illustrations for Al-Fajr and Al-Awda (1981-1993) carried his line into the press. He wrote and co-authored books on Palestinian embroidery with Nabil Anani.

During the First Intifada he helped form New Visions (Arabic: nahw al-tajrib wa-al-ibda) with Vera Tamari, Tayseer Barakat, and Nabil Anani. Sources date the collective's formation to 1987 (Mathaf, Wikipedia, official biography) or associate its public presentation with 1989. The artists boycotted Israeli art supplies and worked with mud, straw, wood, leather, henna, coffee, and natural dyes. Mansour's cracked mud figures turned drying earth into metaphor: checkpoints that fragment a landscape, and human fragility waiting to fall. In 1988 he made a series on destroyed villages including Yibna, Yalo, Imwas, and Bayt Dajan. Works such as Rituals under Occupation (1989) placed a flag-draped, cross-shaped coffin above a crowd of individually painted faces at a time when the flag itself was forbidden.

He built institutions as carefully as paintings. In 1994 he co-founded al-Wasiti Art Center in East Jerusalem. He joined the Founding Board of the International Academy of Art Palestine (established mid-2000s; Wikipedia cites 2004 for the founding board; related sources also note a 2006 launch). He taught for years at Al-Quds University (about 2000-2014) and earlier at teachers' and handicraft programs. Collections that hold his work include the British Museum, Mathaf in Doha, Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, the Institut du Monde Arabe, Barjeel Art Foundation, and The Palestinian Museum in Birzeit.

Awards marked a long public recognition: Grand Nile Prize at the Seventh Cairo Biennial (1998), Palestine Prize for the Visual Arts (1998), UNESCO-Sharjah Prize for Arab Culture (2019), and the Necip Fazil Awards in Istanbul (2025). Qantara and other tributes also note a 2016 Medal of Culture, Science and Arts (Level of Excellence) from Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.

In later years a stroke (reported around 2021) affected his left hand. He kept going to his Ramallah studio. In 2024 he made a mural for The Palestinian Museum and, according to BBC reporting, asked only that a fig tree be planted in the garden. On 24 August 2026 he died in East Jerusalem at age 79 after a long illness, having been treated at Makassed Hospital. His family announced the death on his verified Instagram account. A funeral was held on 26 August 2026 at St. Peter's Anglican Church in Birzeit; olive branches draped the coffin; he was buried in Birzeit. Fellow artists called him the main Palestinian painter of his generation. Posters that once hung in refugee-camp rooms had already done their work: they taught a people and a world how to see a homeland that refused to vanish.