Samia Halaby Remembers Sliman Mansour: ‘A Giant in the History of Art’

Sliman Mansour, an artist and educator who helped create the visual language of Palestinian perseverance, died on Monday in Jerusalem at 79. An outpouring of gratitude and grief has followed in the wake of his death from artists and arts professionals within the Arab art community, and beyond, many of whom counted Mansour as both an inspiration and a friend. Below, Samia Halaby, another pioneering Palestinian painter, reflects on Mansour’s life and legacy.

Sliman Mansour affected me hugely when I attended a presentation he made in New York introducing the new art of the Intifada sometime during the late 1970s. It was part of a self-directed project to connect with artists on the “inside” and “outside” after the occupation of the West Bank by Israel in 1967, when the borders between “Palestine48” and the West Bank opened.

“Palestine48” designates for us the part of Palestine occupied in 1948. For me, Sliman was pouring water on a dormant seed anxious to sprout. I was an exile from the 1948 war; he connected me with an art world from which I had been violently separated. I saw Sliman Mansour emerging from where he clearly belonged—a place I yearned for, a place he embraced, a place where he directly experienced the tragedies and hope of the people of the land.

The art and activism of Sliman Mansour were distinguished by his love of Palestine and his innate leadership. He stood apart: a teacher, a mentor to many, an example to most, and a visual reflection of love for our land and culture. We owe him permanent homage. Giants tend to always stand a bit apart, but in true Palestinian style, Sliman had a few dear friends who shared in his times of ease and his laughter.

Sliman was an inspiring part of a nucleus that established the Union of Palestinian Artists, a union that organizationally became part of the Union of Arab Artists. The artists of the Union became mythical heroes at meetings outside Palestine, as they were almost always denied travel by the occupation. Their branch of the Union was unanimously and internationally labeled as the central branch, located in our beloved Jerusalem: Al Quds, the blessed city.

When the Intifada began, the Union of Palestinian Artists took the position in the late 1980s to boycott Israeli art supplies and moved into an exploration of traditional Palestinian and village crafts. Sliman took up clay and hay mixtures used in village open-air ovens. Others in his circle, like Nabil Anani, his close friend, went to Hebron and returned with a car full of leather whose tanning was incomplete. He planned to use it as a base for painting. Nabil and Sliman laughed at how the leather soon stank before Nabil could figure it all out. 

Others, like Tayseer Barakat, took up henna as a water-based medium, while Vera Tamari focused on ceramics. In all four cases, the use of new media sparked impressive new aesthetic modes. Their source was the collective enthusiasm of a population that had gone into revolution—a revolution forming committees of social self-reliance in every field. When I interviewed Sliman some years later, he told me that before the revolutionary motion of the Intifada, he thought his paintings could change the world, but that the Intifada had taught him that harmony with a society in revolutionary motion is, in fact, what changed the world.

He is loved for establishing the al-Wasiti Art Center in 1994 with a nucleus group of artists: Anani, Tayseer Barakat, and Vera Tamari. Located in Jerusalem, al-Wasiti became, for years, the place to visit, empowering Palestinian artists exiled all over the world to return to a fountain of unity and belonging. Al-Wasiti Art Center was named in honor of the deeply respected 13th-century Iraqi artist Yahya ibn Muhammad al-Wasiti.

It was at the al-Wasiti Center that Sliman invited me to write about the art of the Intifada. It led to my first writing on Palestinian art, which was published in Japan. Eventually, it led to my book, Liberation Art of Palestine, published in 2003.

As a painter, I recognize Sliman Mansour as a giant in the history of art. My admiration for his paintings brings several to mind. First, I point to UN Relief (1984), a picture of a mother and child kneeling at the edge of a highway in the desert, with a donkey in the far background. A highway sign showing the Pyramids and saying “650 M” points the way to Egypt. It recalls the flight to Egypt by Mary and the Christ Child. During an interview, Sliman pointed out that perhaps “650 M” was some UN resolution. He told me, as we looked together at the picture, “They took her country, her land, her village, her home, and in return, they gave her a mere loaf of bread.” 

In the painting, this loaf of bread is carefully laid on her lap over a towel edged with blue stripes. The art of the Intifada was a symbolist art that consciously addressed its own population, not the international art world. Its symbols are clear to Palestinians.

Mansour’s painting The Village Awakens (1988) celebrates the awakening of the Intifada. In this painting, Mansour returns to the source of the culture of our great cities: the village and the life it gives. He boldly used the image of a woman dominating the panel, squatting with open thighs, whence a whole population of craftspeople spills out generously into the land and village, making it a unique place of the birth of civilization.

His painting of The Last Supper (1986) shows a group of villagers sitting cross-legged on a rug, surrounding a round table and sharing food from a round tray. The place is an open-air roof under a grapevine arbor. The surrounding farmland is full of olive trees. Mansour shows Christ as a Palestinian, a man of the people, breaking bread with his disciples: a Last Supper in an atmosphere of generous hospitality that is the heart of Palestinian culture.

In 2003, the Station Museum invited me to participate in the gathering of art to create the exhibition “Made in Palestine.” It was my happy duty to guide James Harithas, director of the Station Museum, along with two of his curators and a member of the press, as they traveled through all parts of historic Palestine, including Gaza, Damascus, Amman, and other locations in Jordan. 

Watching Harithas, impressed with Palestinian art, form the show slowly in his mind, without notes, was a view into the mind of a great curator. The result was a magnificent show of Palestinian art titled “Made in Palestine,” which opened at the Station Museum in Houston, Texas, in 2003. On the night of the opening, the art car community of Houston came to pay homage. They lined their dancing cars with flashing lights along the front of the museum, and we Palestinian artists were welcomed to experience those cars from the inside.

Sliman Mansour’s entry in the “Made in Palestine” show was as glorious as the show itself. Two of his major works were shown: I Ismail (1997), a series of six large standing men in clay panels, and, in front of the row of six panels was a floor piece titled Garden of Hope (2002). Both works were made in clay and allowed to dry and crack. Ismail is biblically described as the father of the Arabs, while Garden of Hope references the many freedom fighters who died defending Palestine. Popular and literary myth tells that when martyrs die on the soil, the earth receiving their blood will give forth new fighters, thus the roses scattered on the cracking mud.

Sliman Mansour is ours, and we do not forget.