(1932 –  2018)

Jumana El Husseini was born in Jerusalem on April 2, 1932, to Jamal El Husseini and Nimati al-Alami, members of two prominent Jerusalem families. On her father’s side, her links to Jerusalem extended back to at least the 13th century. She had six brothers and five sisters, including Serene Husseini Shahid, and they grew up in their grandfather’s home, the first house built outside the Old City of Jerusalem, in the Musrara neighborhood, about a 20-minutes walk uphill from the Damascus Gate.

El Husseini attended the Friends Girls’ School, a Quaker school in Ramallah. She continued her education in Lebanon, which became her home after the 1948 War for more than three decades. When she made art her life focus, she used various media—oils, watercolors mixed with sand, ceramics, sculpture—to explore her memories of her birth city, which had become largely inaccessible to her.

The struggle to defend Palestine from Zionist and British colonization, which escalated dramatically throughout the 1930s and 1940s, was not an abstraction for young El Husseini. Her father was a prominent figure in the Palestinian national movement, which put him in the crosshairs of British Mandate authorities. He was imprisoned by the British twice, first in Acre in 1933 and again in Rhodesia from 1942 to 1946. Many of her immediate relatives were also Palestinian political leaders and as such were targeted by the authorities in similar ways. These and other political events and upheavals had profound effects on El Husseini and her family.

Witnessing her father’s tumultuous political career and the destruction of her and her family’s life in Jerusalem, it is small wonder that Jerusalem remained indelibly imprinted in her memory following her and her family’s exile from their city.

In 1947, El Husseini went to visit her married sister in Lebanon, and what was intended as a short visit soon turned into a protracted stay. The outbreak of the 1948 War made it impossible for her and her family to return to Jerusalem, like tens of thousands of others. She remained in Lebanon, and when in 1950 she married Orfan Bayazid, she made Lebanon her second home. The couple had three sons.

In 1953, El Husseini enrolled in Beirut College for Women (today’s Lebanese American University) and studied political science for three years; she also took electives in painting, sculpture, and ceramics. She transferred to the American University of Beirut (AUB) and graduated in 1957. At AUB, she took art courses in its newly opened Department of Fine Arts, the first academic art and art history department in a Lebanese institution.5 These art classes opened up a new world for her. Encouraged by an art professor to pursue art, she did just that.

Three years after graduating, she participated in a group exhibit at the Sursock Museum in Beirut. Within five years, her reach extended beyond Lebanon and her art was displayed at Lebanon’s most prestigious art events. Over the next several decades, El Husseini participated in group and solo exhibitions in prestigious venues in no fewer than 30 countries throughout Europe, the United States, the Arab world, the former Soviet Union, China, Japan, and Canada.

El Husseini’s body of work consisted of paintings, ceramics, sculptures, and embroidery. She experimented with media and technique. She mixed oil paint with sand or other materials to create texture on her canvases, using gold or silver leaves for highlights. In the early 1970s, she combined oil paint and embroidery, a combination that has been interpreted as rejecting a distinction between fine art and crafts.13 Her interest in expanding her craft led her to study stained glass art at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1991.

Source: Jerusalem story