Nora Alshaikh
Artist Biography
Nora Alshaikh is a contemporary Palestinian artist based in Orlando, Florida, working in large-scale oil painting at the intersection of cultural memory, figuration, and abstraction. Her work maps the persistence of Palestinian cultural fragments — tatreez, Arab architectural traces, and native Levantine flora — within layered, eroded surfaces, constructing a visual space where memory is carried through the body and across generations.
Born in Amman, Jordan, to Palestinian parents, Alshaikh grew up between two landscapes that share a palette, a texture, and a sense of inherited place. When she relocated to the United States in 2021, that distance sharpened everything — unable to fully arrive here or return there, she found herself suspended between worlds, painting not from a place but from the space between places.
Her work has been exhibited nationally at The Other Art Fair Chicago and Los Angeles, and locally at CityArts Orlando and the Mount Dora Fine Arts Festival. She was recognized with the Award of Honor at ArtWorks Fine Art Festival, Melbourne, FL, and her work has been featured in Saatchi Art's Collection.
Her upcoming body of work, The 24 Hours In-Between, marks a deliberate pivot inward — from the collective memory of a people to the interior landscape of one life suspended between worlds — contributing a distinctly Palestinian visual voice to the broader American contemporary art conversation.
Artist Statement
What if history survived not as a fixed record, but as something continuously evolving, particularly within communities shaped by displacement? Thinking about this has led my practice to function as a visual act of preservation, revealing how memory is carried through the body and across generations, focusing on the tension between what persists and what fades.
Working with oil paint and a muted, desaturated palette rooted in the landscapes of Palestine and Jordan, where color carries the atmospheric weight of remembered place, I construct both figure and ground as interdependent narratives. With brushes, I bring figures into focus — clear, present, and immediate — while the backgrounds unfold through layers of textured abstraction built with palette knives. Within these surfaces, fragments of Palestinian culture — tatreez, Islamic and Arab architectural traces, and native Levantine flora such as olive trees, orange blossoms, and jasmine — appear and disappear, only to be concealed or disrupted. This process mirrors the way memory lingers and shifts: selective, unstable, and fragmented. My figures are not set apart from these spaces; they surface from within them, as if carried by memory itself.
Ultimately, these paintings insist that memory does not stabilize into history but continues to shape us through its fractures — active, unresolved, and evolving.
