Sliman Mansour, the celebrated Palestinian painter who documented more than six decades of his country’s struggle for liberation, has died in Jerusalem at age 79. His family announced the news in an Instagram story post on Monday, August 24, after previously saying the artist was in “critical condition.” The cause of death has not yet been disclosed.
“To the world, he leaves behind a life filled with beauty, memory, and a legacy that will continue to live through all those he touched,” the artist’s family wrote in an Instagram story post. “But to us, we lost a father, our source of love, strength, and home.”
Mansour was born in 1947 in Birzeit, Palestine, only months before the mass displacement and genocide of the Palestinian people began under the Nakba and the formal establishment of the State of Israel. Over the course of his career, he was jailed, beaten, and threatened by the Israeli government, yet he continued to assert human rights through his paintings. Working from his studio in Ramallah in the West Bank, he recorded life before Israeli occupation and the destruction that followed for Palestinian civilians and communities.
“Anything that is Palestinian, even just being here, breathing and thinking, is a sensitive matter to the Israelis because they built their narrative around denying our existence,” Mansour told Hyperallergic in a 2023 interview. “Our work not only as painters but as intellectuals — in culture, in everything — is to express that we are here.”
