| Eretz-Israeli and Palestinian Women Artists during the Mandate Period, edited by Dr. Ruth Markus and Dr. Rona Sela, 2026, Resling Publishing House, 408 pages (in Hebrew) | | | The book Eretz-Israeli and Palestinian Women Artists during the Mandate Period (edited by Dr. Ruth Markus and Dr. Rona Sela, 2026, Resling Publishing House, in Hebrew), constitutes a continuation of a long-term research project on women artists. These women artists were excluded from local art history, with a particular focus on the Mandate period — one of the most significant and formative eras in the development of modern art in general and women’s art in particular. It offers an extensive discussion and introduces new knowledge regarding the work of pioneering Palestinian women artists.
The book addresses the question of why women were erased from canonical history and seeks to restore their prominent work to the center, together with its many characteristics and contexts. Reconstructing the full picture required extensive research and investigative work involving archives, collections, and databases. The works of many Jewish women artists and photographers were discarded or preserved under unsuitable conditions that caused severe damage to their work, often because their artistic production was insufficiently valued either by the establishment and/or by their relatives. There is a lack of documentation and/or an absence of Palestinian archives and collections, since much of artists’ work fell victim to war — destruction, looting, seizure, and plunder, among other forms of loss.
In a slow and Sisyphean research, the information was gathered and transformed into a substantial corpus of knowledge that revives the Mandate period through a long-forgotten prism.
Chapter III by Dr. Rona Sela focuses on five pioneering Palestinian women artists who were active during this period (1917-1948) and traces the fate of the archives and bodies of work of these important women artists, most of which were lost in the aftermath of the Nakba.
| | | | To purchase the book, Resling Publishing House | | |
| | | |  | | Karimeh Abbud, Self Portrait, 1920s | | |
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