Why I've dedicated my life to preserving my Palestinian grandmother's artistic legacy

In the past year, my grandmother Nahil Bishara's art has become my way to reclaim Palestine's narrative

Talia Bishara is the granddaughter of late Palestinian artist Nahil Bishara. Photo: The Bishara family

My family name, Bishara, means "good news" in Arabic. That’s always been a motto of mine – good news only. But over the past year, good news has been hard to come by for Palestinians across the world.

My grandmother’s memory is what’s kept me going. Her name was Nahil Bishara, and she was the most amazing woman I’ve ever met – a pioneering and eclectic artist and designer, an icon in her community, but still mostly unknown outside of Palestine.

Over the past 10 years, I’ve made it my mission to preserve her legacy. It hasn’t been easy. As I’ve reached out to people in the worlds of art and design, I’ve been dismissed time and time again – it is as if because they hadn’t heard of this Palestinian woman, or because her work defied any easy categorisation, she wasn’t worth remembering.

But I know the power her work still holds – and so do the people of Palestine. And that’s why, at one of the most difficult times in our history, even when I feel paralysed, when I can’t find the words myself, I speak with her art. She is my voice.

My grandmother was born in 1919 in Ramallah, and from the years before the Nakba until she passed away in 1997, there was simply no artist on earth quite like her. As a painter, she used the tools of impressionism and abstraction to explore the truth, beauty and humanity of her homeland. As an interior designer, she defined what home meant as a Palestinian, both individually and culturally.

And throughout her life, with the support of my grandfather, a gynaecologist and obstetrician, who helped birth a whole generation of Palestinians, she broke barriers no one thought possible. In 1942, she was the first Palestinian to enrol at the Bezalel School of Art in Jerusalem, which to that point had only admitted Jewish students.

She produced countless works during her career, almost all of them commissioned by the Palestinian community that adored her. In 1964, she was commissioned by the Jordanian royal family to create a bust of Pope Paul VI, which is on display in the Vatican to this day. And her redesign of the Aelia Capitolina in Jerusalem, decorated with 30 of her paintings, still stands as a monument to a culture that many seek to erase.

I only got to spend five years with my grandmother. I used to sit in her room while she painted. She adored us, and she would play with my brothers and I in her room constantly. One day, I accidentally jumped on her stomach, and the pain was so bad that they rushed her to the hospital.

That’s how they found out she had cancer. And when she died in 1997, I remember sitting on the staircase that she had designed, and even though she was so present in that house, nothing was the same without her there.

I loved Palestine, but my life wasn’t normal. I saw things no child should see. And then during the second intifada, there was a bombing at my school in Jerusalem, and the next day I was at a different school in Amman.

Even though we were safer there, I never felt at peace in Jordan the same way I did in Palestine. It only started to feel like home when, years later, my mother brought the furniture and paintings of my grandmother. After that, whenever my friend would come over, I would guide them through her works, explaining how amazing she was in a superficial and child-like way.

It wasn’t until years later that I decided to really understand. I started digging into her letters, asked questions to my father and anyone who knew her, and following it all like a roadmap through her life. And with time, I felt like I finally understood her.

One thing I learnt was how much she yearned to be on the global stage. Her art was her messaging, and she wanted the world to know Palestine both as a place and a people. There was a line from an Iranian poet she loved: Within each particle of the universe, a radiant light resides, illuminating the essence of all creation. In her letters, she would always refer to nature as radiation, and she found energy and culture in the deepest recesses of the natural world – always pushing herself further.

It took a lot of courage at first to fight for her memory. Apart from the tireless support of art collector George Al Aama, I was discouraged time and time again, and it wasn’t until I messaged Sultan Al Qassemi, the Emirati founder of the Barjeel Art Foundation who has dedicated himself to preserving modern Arab art, that I found the strength to keep pushing forward.

I kept asking people to connect me, but no one would, so I messaged him on Instagram, never thinking he would answer. To my surprise he did, and he knew my grandmother, inviting me to a dinner in Amman full of luminaries of Jordan's cultural scene. I gifted him a plate she had crafted with Hebron glass with the word Allah on it in gold leaf. He accepted it graciously, and put me on the spot to speak about her to everyone else at the table. I started talking about her with pride and I truly felt heard by all in attendance, and from that day I’ve never stopped.

It is not only my grandmother’s body of work that has not earned the global reputation it so richly deserves. The West has long acted as if we are centuries behind them artistically, when Arab artists have always been at the forefront of innovation, and often, like my grandmother, far ahead of their time.

I know in my heart that my grandmother created such a varied body of work because she took a holistic approach to Palestine. She wanted all the tools to speak, so that the world would understand us better.

Over the past year, we’ve watched an unbearable amount of destruction in Palestine. But when you would think that Palestinians would lose hope, their will only grows stronger.

And recently, I’ve noticed that Palestinians are talking about my grandmother again. They’re posting her on Facebook, her Wikipedia has been created and maintained and people are writing about her work. People are using art and culture to speak up about Palestine. Even those in Ramallah, with no connection to it, are embracing her art.

Many of us feel that there’s nothing left to say that hasn’t been said for 75 years. We want to let things out differently, and focusing on creation rather than destruction has a power we’re still learning to harness.

History repeats itself. We will never understand our present and future if we do not understand our past. If you want to see what’s next, you need to look at what was. And words can’t take everywhere – art matters just as much. Our culture, our home, our story is embedded in our creations and our collective achievements, and that can never be allowed to slip from memory, lest we lose our own narrative.

As told to William Mullally