Grandfather, by Fouad Agbaria

Known for art that blends cultural history, landscape, and pattern work, Fouad Agbaria offers Palestinian narratives often left untold in the media. A Palestinian artist living in the Galilee region of Israel, he has gained prominence as one of a younger generation of Palestinian artists developing a visual catalog of a people and their relationship with their history, land, language, and religious traditions.

Agbaria considers his work a “journey in search of light.” And the light he searches out, he shares: the light of patterns of the fields, of a relationship—as in this painting, Grandfather, in which the landscape and the sower, harvester, and laborer are one and the same. Painting by painting, Agbaria brings together that which “make[s] up the story of a nation,” he writes. Even in an “assaulted land,” his work is the “lighting [of] oil lanterns to illuminate” the dimensions of beauty and perpetuate deepest memory.