Vera Tamari
فيرا تماري
Ceramicist, installation artist, and art historian
Ceramicist and museum-builder who, after Israeli tanks crushed hundreds of cars in Ramallah in 2002, lined five of the wrecks up on a road she built and called it Going for a Ride?
Vera Tamari was born in Jerusalem in 1945 into a Palestinian Christian family with roots in Jaffa. She took a BA in fine arts at Beirut College for Women in 1966, studied ceramics in Florence between 1972 and 1974, and completed an M.Phil in Islamic art and architecture at Oxford in 1984 — a training that runs from the potter’s wheel to the historiography of Islamic design, and shows in work that keeps returning to Palestinian ceramic and tile traditions.
She was a founding member of the League of Palestinian Artists in 1973 and, in 1987, of the New Visions group with Tayseer Barakat, Sliman Mansour, and Nabil Anani, whose members pledged to work only in locally found materials rather than buy Israeli art supplies. From 1986 she taught art history and visual communication in Birzeit University’s architecture department for close to twenty years. In 2005 she founded the Birzeit Museum of Ethnography and Art, and ran the Virtual Communication Gallery from 2005 to 2010 to keep exchange open with artists in the diaspora.
Her best-known work came out of the 2002 reinvasion of the West Bank. Between March and June, Israeli tanks entering Ramallah and al-Bireh crushed hundreds of privately owned cars while their owners watched from under curfew. Tamari graded, steamrolled, and tarred a short road across the playing field of the Friends Boys’ School, and set five of the smashed cars along it, fitted with transistor radios and trinkets to counterfeit an ordinary outing. She called it Going for a Ride? Within hours of the opening on 23 June 2002, Israeli armoured vehicles returned and destroyed the installation. It survives in photographs and film.
Selected works
- Going for a Ride? (installation, Ramallah, 2002)
- Founding of the Birzeit Museum of Ethnography and Art (2005)
- Ceramic relief works drawing on Palestinian landscape and tile tradition
Sources
Further reading
An external biography or archive holding more on this life than the entry above.
Connected in the archive
13 connected records13 records elsewhere in the archive are linked to this one, each by a piece of evidence you can read below.
born in — 1 record
- Jerusalemالقدس
Evidence — From a recorded field in this archive: birthplace: "Jerusalem, Palestine" → Jerusalem (Jerusalem Governorate)
named in this record — 3 records
One record names the other. A pointer for reading, not a claim that they belong to each other.
- Jaffaيافا
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: Vera Tamari was born in Jerusalem in 1945 into a Palestinian Christian family with roots in Jaffa.
- Ramallahرام الله
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: Ceramicist and museum-builder who, after Israeli tanks crushed hundreds of cars in Ramallah in 2002, lined five of the wrecks up on a road she built and called it Going for a Ride?
- Sliman Mansourسليمان منصور
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: She was a founding member of the League of Palestinian Artists in 1973 and, in 1987, of the New Visions group with Tayseer Barakat, Sliman Mansour, and Nabil Anani, whose members pledged to work only in locally found materials rather than buy Israeli art supplies.
on a related subject — 9 records
Filed near each other — the same Mandate district, or the same uncommon subject tags.
- Armenian Ceramics of Jerusalem
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: Shared tag: "ceramics".
- Emily Jacirإميلي جاسر
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: Shared tag: "installation".
- Ibrahim Abu-Lughodإبراهيم أبو لغد
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: Shared tag: "Birzeit".
- Marwan Barghoutiمروان البرغوثي
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: Shared tag: "Birzeit".
- Mona Hatoumمنى حاطوم
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: Shared tag: "installation".
- Mustafa Barghoutiمصطفى البرغوثي
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: Shared tag: "Ramallah".
- and 3 more
Cite this page
Every claim above carries its sources — citation is the point.
- Chicago
“Vera Tamari.” Figures, FALASTEEN.AI. Accessed 22 August 2026. https://falasteen.ai/figures/vera-tamari.- MLA
“Vera Tamari.” Figures, FALASTEEN.AI, 2026, https://falasteen.ai/figures/vera-tamari. Accessed 22 August 2026.- BibTeX
@misc{falasteen-vera-tamari, title = {Vera Tamari}, howpublished = {\url{https://falasteen.ai/figures/vera-tamari}}, organization = {FALASTEEN.AI — A Living Archive for Palestine}, year = {2026}, note = {Accessed 2026-08-22} }