How Palestinian Artists Turn Resistance into Art: A Legacy of New Visions

In a small studio in Ramallah, surrounded by the stillness of occupied Palestine, 82-year-old artist Nabil Anani continues to paint. His hands move with deliberate care, but his heart is fueled by something deeper a movement that began decades ago, born out of struggle and a longing for freedom.

Back in 1987, during the tumult of the First Intifada, Anani and three fellow Palestinian artists Sliman Mansour, Vera Tamari, and Tayseer Barakat made a decision that would shape the trajectory of Palestinian art. They co-founded the New Visions movement, driven by a simple yet powerful idea: art could be a form of resistance.

They chose to stop using Israeli-supplied materials, turning instead to what the land offered olive wood, clay, natural dyes, and earth itself. At a time when survival was a daily battle, their art became an act of defiance, a declaration that even without resources, they would continue to create, to remember, to be seen.

“New Visions emerged as a response to the conditions of the Intifada,” says Anani. “Self-reliance and boycott became more than political they became artistic principles.”

Each of the founding members chose a material to explore, building a unique artistic language rooted in resilience:

• Vera Tamari, now 80, turned broken landscapes into ceramic olive trees one for every real tree scorched by settlers. Her work Tale of a Tree grew into a sculptural sigh of remembrance. Later, she fused watercolors onto ceramics, blending the unblendable to reflect the layered complexity of Palestinian life memory, identity, and hope.

• Tayseer Barakat, 66, created his own pigments and etched fire into wood. What others might have seen as damage, he transformed into revelation a story burned into existence.

• Sliman Mansour, 78, once felt trapped by the repetition of painting national symbols. But the movement cracked something open for him. “Other artists began to embrace earth, leather, natural dyes even the brokenness of the materials became part of the story,” he recalls.

Now, nearly forty years later, the spirit of New Visions lives on in a new generation.

In Gaza, 18-year-old artist Hussein al-Jerjawi paints portraits of shattered lives using whatever he can find. Flour bags from UNRWA, pieces of wall, pencil scraps anything becomes a canvas. “Mansour’s style showed me how to speak about occupation through art,” he says. But even those flour bags, once a rare gift, are gone now because of the ongoing blockade. Still, Hussein persists considering buying empty sacks just to keep creating.

Another Gaza-born artist, Hazem Harb, now based in Dubai, also carries the pulse of New Visions in his work. No matter how far he travels, the movement remains his anchor a reminder that art is not only about beauty but survival.

To create under occupation is to resist. To use the earth, the rubble, the ashes as tools of expression is to claim a truth that cannot be seized or silenced. The New Visions movement wasn’t just about art. It was about staying alive in a world trying to erase you.

And today, from Ramallah to Gaza, from refugee camps to global galleries, Palestinian artists continue to carry that flame turning scarcity into strength, brokenness into power, and resistance into creation.