Sliman Mansour

The recent passing of the great Palestinian artist Sliman Mansour, on August 24, 2026, has made me think again about the first time I encountered his work. I was struck not only by what he was saying through his images, but by how he worked with material.

Mansour began mixing mud, clay, straw, and henna on wood. For him, mud carried two meanings at once. It was connected to childhood memories of watching his Salman grandmother build mud ovens in Birzeit, but it was also literally the soil of Palestine transformed into material for his art.

As a sculptor, I understand the world through my hands. Where words can sometimes become tangled through language and cultural metaphors, material can speak directly. Weight, texture, space, and form can carry things that words cannot always hold.

This is why Mansour’s work matters so deeply to me. He understood that culture is not an abstraction. It has a physical presence. It lives in the land, in the objects people make, in the patterns they repeat, in the stories they tell, and in the images they leave behind.

When a people’s identity is threatened, visual art, poetry, and literature become more than cultural expression. They become acts of resistance, memory, and survival. We need to protect not only the documents and physical places that tell us what happened, but also the visual and written archives that allow a culture to remain visible.

In 1987, Mansour joined Vera Tamari, Tayseer Barakat, and Nabil Anani in founding the New Visions Collective. During a period of intense censorship and restrictions surrounding Palestinian imagery, they rejected dependence on imported Israeli art materials and began working with materials close to home — mud, clay, straw, henna, coffee, and wood.

For me, this is one of the most important things about Mansour’s work.

He did not simply paint about his homeland. He brought the homeland into the material of the artwork.

By using the physical soil of Palestine, he made culture tactile. Tangible. It is the literal mud beneath our feet shaped into human dignity.

This profoundly changed the way I think about material in my own work. Mansour reminds artists that the materials we choose are never entirely neutral. They can carry place, history, memory, labor, loss, and belonging.

This is what I think artists need to remember: we are not working outside of culture. We are working inside it.

Mansour spent more than half a century anchoring Palestinian identity into visual reality. His olive trees, orange groves, embroidered dresses, village landscapes, Jerusalem, and human figures gave form to a people whose physical presence was repeatedly threatened, displaced, and restricted.

Now, in the midst of genocide, his work makes visible what violence cannot be allowed to make invisible: a people, their land, and the culture that binds them together.

His work asks us to look at what remains — and to recognize what the world might otherwise lose.

When looking at some of these works today through digital archives, I was initially disappointed by the photographs. Some are faded, creased, poorly lit, or otherwise imperfect.

Then I realized what I was looking at.

These were not polished studio photographs. Some had survived through personal collections, family drawers, scrapbooks, and archives across decades of displacement. We are lucky to see them at all.

The photographs themselves have become part of the history. They are the raw, surviving fragments of a culture that refused to be silenced.

A country’s people are not the only ones who carry the scars of history. The artwork carries them too. Sometimes the physical condition of an image tells us something about the journey it has taken to reach us.

And then there is the experience of looking.

Looking at the gray concrete wall is like watching a silent television set broadcasting everything they missed. On the surface of this stone, Children of Jerusalem stands bearing the heavy weight of her city. The little girl holds a small flag, almost easy to miss, while her embroidered pullover carries the quiet memory of the land.

But that’s why this work is so powerful.

It is a devastating, heavy kind of looking — like watching a sad movie in which the children do not yet understand the story they are living, while we, looking back, know what is coming.

A photograph can never replace encountering a work of sculpture or painting in person. I know this from my own work. A photograph is not the experience of the object, but it can leave a deep trace — one that can move throughout the world.

Sometimes a photograph becomes the doorway through which an experience survives.

This is why open, freely accessible archives matter.

When photographs of cultural art are made publicly available, they give that work another life. They allow a student in Tokyo, a poet in Nairobi, or a sculptor like me to encounter an artist they might otherwise never have known.

Free public images can become a kind of digital shelter for cultural memory. They allow the work to remain visible even when physical places are inaccessible, damaged, or destroyed.

Literature writes our history. Poetry captures something of the soul. Visual art gives memory a shape we can hold onto.

We lose something from our collective human story when we allow a culture’s art to disappear from view.

Sliman Mansour understood this.

He gave the land a body. He gave memory a material form. And through his extraordinary work, he made visible a culture that insisted on remaining visible.

As I look at his work now, I think about the responsibility artists have — not only to make, but to notice, remember, and carry something forward.

Mansour said it simply:

“art is a form of saying we are here… It gives home to the homeless.”

— Sliman Mansour

TO SEE PHOTOS GO TO MEDIUM LINK BELOW:

https://medium.com/the-infinite-within/sliman-mansour-92a466dfe48d

Sherburn LaBelle

Published on Medium 

August 28, 2026

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