Vera Tamari

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

• Vera Tamari’s Lifetime of Palestinian Art — The Markaz Review
• Going for a Ride? — Toronto Palestine Film Festival
• Vera Tamari — Wikipedia