Palestinian heritage can appear in art in very different ways. Sometimes it is immediately recognisable: an olive tree, an embroidered dress, a stone house. Sometimes it is hidden in a geometric pattern, an old story or the memory of a spring that once brought a whole village together. These five Palestinian artists approach heritage from very different directions — but for each of them, the past is something living, carried into the present.

It feels especially important to begin with Sliman Mansour. The Palestinian artist, whose work helped shape the visual language of modern Palestinian art for more than five decades, passed away on August 24, 2026, aged 79. His art has become deeply part of how Palestine is seen, remembered, and represented.

Throughout his career, Mansour returned to the landscapes and symbols that surrounded him: olive trees, orange groves, Jerusalem, stone terraces and women in traditional embroidered dresses. But these were never simply picturesque details. In his work, they carried ideas of land, memory, displacement and belonging.

During the First Intifada, Mansour co-founded the New Visions collective and began working with locally sourced materials such as mud and henna instead of conventional art supplies. It made the connection between art and land almost literal.

His work feels so inseparable from Palestinian heritage. Mansour did not document its symbols — over decades, he helped turn them into a visual language recognised far beyond Palestine.

Nabil Anani has spent more than five decades looking at Palestine — quite literally. Born in Latrun in 1943, he studied fine art at Alexandria University before returning to Palestine in 1969, where he became an artist, educator and one of the key figures in the development of contemporary Palestinian art.

His paintings are often full of things that feel deliberately everyday: hills, villages, stone houses, families, women in embroidered dresses, people harvesting or gathering together. That everyday quality is important. Instead of treating heritage as something preserved behind glass, Anani paints it as something people actually live.

The Palestinian landscape is one of his longest-running subjects. His book The Land and I, for example, brings together more than 180 works made from the 1970s onwards, creating what the Palestinian Museum describes as a visual record of a landscape undergoing enormous change.

Jumana Emil Abboud takes us somewhere completely different: into stories.

Born in 1971, Abboud grew up between the Galilee and Canada before returning to Jerusalem as a young adult. Her work spans drawing, performance, video, installation and text, but much of it begins with Palestinian folktales and oral histories — especially stories connected to the landscape.

She has become particularly interested in water: wells, rivers and natural springs, and the stories people once told around them. Her long-running research has explored Palestinian traditions surrounding haunted or enchanted water sources, including tales of spirits and supernatural beings associated with particular springs. For Abboud, these aren't simply charming old myths. Stories are a way of mapping a place, passing knowledge between generations and remembering landscapes that have changed or become inaccessible.

It makes her work a fascinating example of heritage that isn't necessarily an object at all. Sometimes what survives is a story someone remembers — and tells again.

At first glance, Kamal Boullata's work may seem like the outlier on this list. There are no obvious olive groves or village scenes. Instead, there are squares, colours, Arabic letters and intricate geometric structures.

Born in Jerusalem in 1942, Boullata grew up in the Old City and later spent much of his adult life outside Palestine after being unable to return following the 1967 war. Jerusalem nevertheless remained fundamental to his work. The calligraphy and geometric patterns he encountered around the Dome of the Rock as a child would eventually feed into an artistic language all his own.

Boullata often incorporated Arabic words into angular Kufic forms, turning writing into abstraction. Look more closely at his geometric compositions and another connection appears: their structures can also recall the patterns of traditional Palestinian embroidery. He combined those references with modern abstraction rather than reproducing historical motifs literally.

And that is perhaps the most interesting thing about his relationship with heritage: you don't always need to paint the past for it to be present. Sometimes it survives in the way a line is drawn, a word is constructed, or a pattern repeats.