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Modern Palestinian art took shape in the bourgeois salons of nineteenth-century Cairo, the Ottoman-era workshops of Jerusalem’s icon painters, the militant presses of revolutionary Beirut, and the sewing circles of Amman’s refugee camps. It emerged from the state-sponsored art schools of the Communist Bloc, in conversation with the Black Panther Party, through crowds of curious exhibition-goers in Tokyo and Oslo and Tehran and, of course, in defiance of the ongoing Israeli occupation. This class introduces students to art made in and around Palestine between 1880 and today, focusing on its engagement with the myriad worlds in which it has always participated. How can visual culture mediate relationships to local heritage across space and time, or negotiate nationalism in the absence of a nation? What tensions arise around the circulation of artwork inexorably linked to a liberation struggle? How have artists navigated questions of the “postcolonial” as the subjects of a contemporary colonial regime? This class will explore modern Palestinian visual art from a transnational perspective, paying particular attention to the roles of women and gender in its creation, content, and display.