Guest Editors: Nadi Abusaada and Faris Shomali.
In a 1965 essay for Hiwar, Jabra Ibrahim Jabra described the experience of seeing Jerusalem as a temporally thick encounter in which “history—a history of 4000 years—coalesces into a single moment, the moment in which one sees it.” Jabra’s reflection gestures toward the way in which the ostensibly simple act of looking in Jerusalem is never neutral. Vision in the city is overdetermined: shaped by layered histories, competing narratives, and unresolved political claims. To see Jerusalem, in this sense, is always to see through inherited frames of meaning, whether religious, national, or colonial.
Scholarship on Jerusalem’s visual culture has long shown how the city’s symbolic density positioned it at the center of competing modes of representation. Throughout the twentieth century, Jerusalem emerged as a key site of artistic production, but also of contestation, as Palestinians, Zionists, and British colonial actors advanced divergent aesthetic projects that were inseparable from their political and ideological ambitions. As artist and art historian Kamal Boullata has argued, the late Ottoman period had already laid the groundwork for a secular modern art in Palestine—one that emerged from, yet ultimately diverged from, local religious pictorial traditions. At the same time, British colonial officials invested heavily in promoting an idealized and carefully managed image of Jerusalem. For the British architect Charles Ashbee, who played a central role in shaping the city’s planning under the Mandate, Jerusalem was a “city of the mind”—a romanticized idea that overlooked contemporary social and political realities. Parallel to this, the establishment of the Bezalel School positioned Jerusalem as a laboratory for the production of a national art in service of the Zionist settler-colonial project. Each of these frameworks advanced a distinct way of seeing. They looked at the same city and produced different Jerusalem(s).
This special issue of Jerusalem Quarterly takes these competing aesthetic visions as a point of departure to examine the experiences of seeing Jerusalem from the late Ottoman period to the present, and to consider how such experiences have shaped artistic production, reception, and historiography. It is concerned both with the place of Jerusalem within local, regional, and international art histories and with the art history of the city itself. We are particularly interested in contributions that situate Jerusalem within wider geographies of movement and exchange of artists, artworks, pedagogies, and materials, while remaining attentive to the ruptures introduced by colonialism, dispossession, and war.
The issue especially welcomes critical interventions that address the periods before and after 1948, tracing both continuities and breaks in artistic practice in and beyond Jerusalem. We encourage essays that examine exhibitions, galleries, museums, and cultural institutions in Palestine, historical and contemporary, and the roles they have played in shaping artistic communities and discourse. This is especially pertinent in the present moment, as Palestinian cultural institutions in Jerusalem are under acute threat, including the emptying of the Palestine Archaeological Museum and the systematic pressure placed on other Palestinian archives, libraries, and cultural spaces in the city. These developments demand urgent scholarly engagement with questions of institutional vulnerability, cultural erasure, and the politics of history.
At the same time, this issue seeks to move beyond Jerusalem as a singular or self-contained center. We invite contributions that explore Jerusalem’s artistic and material connections with other Palestinian cities such as Bethlehem, Haifa, Jaffa, and Gaza, as well as with regional cultural capitals including Cairo, Damascus, and Beirut. Studies of artisanal and craft traditions are particularly welcome, including work on Armenian ceramic production in Jerusalem, Bethlehem’s mother-of-pearl carving, and Hebron’s glass and leather industries, which foreground Palestine as an expansive field of circulation, labor, and exchange rather than a bounded territorial entity.
Together, these concerns open onto a set of interrelated themes that rethink Jerusalem not as a fixed artistic center, but as a contested, networked, and historically unstable site whose images, materials, and institutions continue to shape, and be shaped by, broader questions of art, politics, and historiography.
Suggested Themes and Topics:
- Revisiting Boullata’s 2008 book on the historiography of modern Palestinian visual art
- Revisiting the question of the “roots” of Palestinian art and the relationship between painting, iconography, and Islamic arts.
- The relationship between local and Orientalist representations of Jerusalem in the visual arts.
- Questioning the centrality of Jerusalem in this history of Palestinian identity formation and art historiography (exploring other artistic Palestinian centres like Haifa and Jaffa).
- Questioning continuity and rupture in Palestinian artistic production in Jerusalem, parallel to major geopolitical events (e.g., 1948 Nakba, 1967 occupation, Second Intifada).
- The relationship between religiosity and secularism in artistic production around Jerusalem, including the influence of the city’s religious sites and history on modern and contemporary Palestinian art.
- The artistic connection between Jerusalem and other creative centres in Palestine, the Arab region, and the world.
- Mapping the city’s art infrastructure and highlighting overlooked figures (artists, patrons, collectors), institutions (e.g., schools, religious and grassroots institutions, collectives, galleries, exhibition venues), and periods (e.g., Jordanian rule 1948-67).
- The symbiosis between visual art, craft, and architecture in Jerusalem’s context
- Tracing the networks of Palestinian art education in Jerusalem and abroad, and the inter-generational exchange of artistic knowledge.
- The commercialization/commodification of art, as well as the relationship between the market and Jerusalem’s artistic scene, including the influence of Jerusalem’s tourist and pilgrimage industries on art and contemporary auctions.
- The relationship between technology and artistic production and reception in and of Jerusalem (including photography, print making, newspapers, digital media).
- The question of provenance, historical sources and the lifeworlds of Palestinian art and material culture and their histories, including the destruction, looting, and reclamation of artworks and cultural archives.
Submission Guidelines
Authors are invited to submit original articles, essays, or pieces for JQ‘s permanent sections that align with the theme of the special issue. In addition to academic articles, contributions to this issue can take a variety of forms, such as interviews, testimonies, translations of primary materials, book and exhibition reviews, and photo essays.
- Peer-reviewed articles – up to 8,000 words: Original pieces of research that make a scholarly contribution. These articles are double-blind peer-reviewed.
- Essays – 3,500–5,000 words: Analytical or reflective pieces that engage critically with contemporary or historical issues without the formal structure of peer-reviewed research.
- Letters from Jerusalem – up to 3,000 words: First-person accounts, reportage, or reflective writing offering grounded perspectives from Jerusalem/Palestine.
- Exhibition and art book reviews – approximately 2,000 words.
The digital format of JQ has the advantage of allowing published articles to include video sources, as well.
Authors are requested to adhere to JQ’s Submission Guidelines, available at: www.palestine-studies.org/en/journals/jq/how-to-submit
Process and Deadlines
Please send a proposal abstract of 300–500 words to the managing editor: jq@palestine-studies.org; using ‘special issue art’ in the subject line. The abstract should give a clear sense of the scope and argument of the proposed manuscript, and its connection to the issue’s themes.
Abstract submission deadline: 20 February 2026
Accepted proposals will be asked to submit a full manuscript draft by 30 June 2026
The Jerusalem Quarterly plans to publish the special issue in 2027.
For inquiries or further information, please contact the editors at ckhoury@palestine-studies.org and jq.assistanteditor@palestine-studies.org.
About the Jerusalem Quarterly
The Jerusalem Quarterly (JQ) is the leading journal on the past, present, and future of Jerusalem. It documents the current status of the city and its predicaments. It is also dedicated to new and rigorous lines of inquiry by emerging scholars on Palestinian society and culture. Published since 1998 by the Institute for Palestine Studies through its affiliate, the Institute of Jerusalem Studies, the Jerusalem Quarterly is available online in its entirety at www.palestine-studies.org/en/journals/jq/about.