Written by WAFA ROZ

Vera Tamari is a Palestinian artist, educator, and curator born in 1945 to a creative Jerusalem household. Her mother, Margo Dabbas, and brother, Vladimir Tamari, were both visual artists, and her sister, Tania, is a classical singer. In 1966, she received a B.A. in fine arts from the Beirut College for Women (presently the Lebanese American University), and studied ceramics at the Istituto Statale d’Arte per la Ceramica in Florence, Italy, from 1972 to 1974. In 1984, she obtained an MPhil in Islamic Art and Architecture from Oxford University. Tamari joined the Faculty of Architecture at Birzeit University in 1986, where she taught art history and visual communication for nearly two decades and established the Birzeit Ethnographic and Art Museum in 2005.

Tamari was only three years old when the 1948 Nakba threw her country into conditions of chaos from which it has yet to recover. Growing up in a perpetual state of war, with no resolution to the Israeli occupation in sight, she reached for art, culture, and education as a means of resistance and relief. She delivered political statements through her artistic expression, cultivated institutional spaces to preserve Palestinian cultural identity, and developed interactive programs to enhance critical thinking and creativity. Upon her return from university in Beirut in 1967, she taught art at an UNRWA-run training center for women in Ramallah and organized tours to villages to expose her students to nature and traditional craftsmanship. Inspired by the villages’ women potters, Tamari decided to venture into the field of ceramics, ultimately going to Italy for further training in the art before starting a ceramics studio in El Bireh, a town near Ramallah, in 1975. She created delicate bas-relief paintings and sculptures comprised of carved figures on kneaded clay over wooden surfaces. The compact size of her works and the intricate details reflected the sensitivity of her themes: family portraits, childhood memories, and landscapes depicting the rootedness of Palestinian identity. In general, Tamari chose to depict her main subjects using the natural hue of the clay, while she used warm colors to paint other motifs. For most of her stand-alone sculptures, Tamari drew inspiration from the woman’s body and the swaying trunks of olive trees. In addition to her work in ceramics, she produced landscape paintings in watercolor and ink, as well as abstract compositions with fabric collage depicting the resilience of the Palestinian woman.

In concurrence with and as part of the First Palestinian Intifada (1987-1993), Tamari, along with Sliman Mansour, Nabil Anani, and Tayseer Barakat, established The New Vision Movement. The four artists proposed a new approach in both form and context to what was known at the time as committed art, an art that served the cause of Palestinian liberation through conventional means and symbols. The New Vision Movement challenged artists to boycott any material imported from Israel, which included virtually all synthetic paints, dyes, and other commonly used art supplies. Instead, artists of the New Vision used natural material from their land to create inventive alternatives to the imports they had once relied upon. Tamari made her pottery clay, while other artists exploited leather, henna, mud, natural dyes, and wood.

At the time of the First Intifada, Palestinian universities did not have fine arts programs. In her capacity as an instructor at the Birzeit University, Tamari sought to remediate this gap; she promoted art by encouraging her students to explore and create paintings, drawings, and sculptures. She organized exhibitions in lecture halls and corridors and invited renowned artists such as Samia Halaby to collaborate in studio works. In 1994, she was assigned to oversee Dr. Tawfik Canaan’s ethnographic collection of amulets, and select artworks contributed by prominent international and Middle Eastern artists to the University. Tamari labored for nearly a decade in order to secure a permanent home for this collection, ultimately establishing The Birzeit University Ethnographic and Art Museum in 2005. She launched the museum with an inaugural exhibition she curated herself, entitled ‘Stateless Nation’ after the Palestinian contribution to the 2003 Venice Biennale. The artwork that inspired her, designed by Bethlehem-born Sandi Hilal and her Italian husband, Alessandro Petti, was made in the form of 10 seven-foot-high passports dispersed around the grounds of the famous exhibition.

In addition to the Birzeit museum, Vera Tamari created ‘The Paltel Virtual Gallery,’ a website for the promotion of contemporary Palestinian art, facilitating cultural exchange with Palestinians in the diaspora. This curatorial intervention marked a new period of experimentation, where Tamari began working in installation art and organizing creative exhibitions that introduced contemporary means of communication.

Tamari’s graceful activism and daring spirit were best exemplified in her 2002 installation Going for a Ride?, which reacted to Israel’s brutal destruction of hundreds of private cars in Ramallah. The artist requested that five of the crushed cars be polished and lined up on the road she created in a soccer field next to her house; adding to the “joyride” was a radio installation of popular music. During that same year, Tamari celebrated the endurance of the Palestinian people through her sculptural installation, Tale of a Tree (2002), which included 660 tiny clay trees and a photo transfer print on Plexiglas. At the time of this installation, Israeli forces were destroying olive groves en masse to make way for the construction of the Apartheid Wall: as the barrier separating Israel from the West Bank is known among Palestinians. She produced hundreds of small olive trees in clay as a healing act while uttering within: “For every uprooted tree, I will create a new one!” She painted her fragile trees in bright pastel colors as a gesture of hope.

Tamari has curated several significant exhibitions around the Palestinian cause, as well as others exploring the complex facets of Palestinian feminism. In 2009, she decided to move beyond the enclosed space of the museum into the public domain, founding ‘Cities Exhibition’ which coordinated a series of annual exhibitions in the university’s museum with events taking place in a selected city in the Occupied Territories. These exhibitions included public interventions, site-specific works, video installations, and performances voicing the Palestinian struggle and marking history that is frequently erased and eclipsed by dominant colonial narratives.

Vera Tamari still resides and works in Ramallah, Palestine.

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