In the first half of the twentieth century in Palestine, artists worked within a political landscape in near constant transition—including the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, the First World War, British occupation (in the form of the British Mandate from 1920-1948), and the growth of Arab nationalism and Zionism. Yet the primary subjects of Palestinian painting were bucolic hillsides, meadows with colorful constellations of blooming wildflowers, and still lifes of lush botanical specimens. Unlike Palestinian poets from the same period, who evoked images of inhospitable lands to describe the harsh impacts of colonial and settler-colonial forces, painters such as Nicola Saig, Sophie Halaby, and Jabra Ibrahim Jabra presented Palestine’s botanical bounty as untouched, serene, and intact. This talk investigates their canvases within a history of representations of Palestinian flora, from the rise of the scriptural-scientific field of “biblical botany” in the eighteenth century to institutionalized forms of “botanical nationalism” taught in government, missionary, and Zionist schools in the early twentieth century. Arguing that Palestinian painters drew from the ground as a form of care, resilience, and resistance amid political instability, this research exposes how Palestine’s natural bounty has formed the basis for new experiments in Palestinian art since the twilight of Ottoman rule. Tracing connections to contemporary Palestinian artists who root their practices in local ecologies, such as Jumana Manna, Saj Issa, Nida Sinnokrot, and Emily Jacir, this talk suggests that far from becoming a captivating interest for Palestinian artists only in response to the Nakba after 1948, the matter of the land has been a central preoccupation of Palestinian art and artists over the past 150 years.

Nisa Ari is Associate Professor of Art History at Montserrat College of Art. She regularly publishes on Palestinian art in the late-19th and early-20th centuries and her research has been supported by numerous fellowships, including the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art (Washington, D.C.), the Mellon Foundation/American Council for Learned Societies, and the Palestinian American Research Center. She earned her Ph.D. in the History, Theory, and Criticism of Art and Architecture program at MIT and her B.A. in Art History from Stanford University.

This roundtable event is co-sponsored by the Department of Art & Art History, Stanford Global Studies, Stanford Humanities Center, and the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies. Attendance is limited to Stanford affiliates only.

Image: American Colony Photo Department, “Lily of the Field” Anemone, c. 1910-1925, hand-colored glass slide, The American Colony Photo Department Glass Slide Collection, Uppsala University Library Special Collections, Uppsala. Photo: Nisa Ari.