About The 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, distributed 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 Editorial Team 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.
Select Exhibitions
The exhibitions and art fairs below represent a selected record of my work in juried and curated contexts since relocating to the United States in 2021. Across fifteen participations — spanning local community galleries, regional festivals, and national art fairs — each show has shaped how I think about my work, my audience, and my place within the broader contemporary art conversation. What appears here reflects the milestones that marked the clearest turning points in that journey.
2025
Affordable Art Exhibition (Juried)
CityArts Orlando Orlando, FL
2025
Mount Dora Fine Arts Festival — 50th Annual (Juried)
Mount Dora, FL
2024
ArtWorks of Eau Gallie Fine Arts Festival (Juried)
Melbourne, FL
2023
Des Moines Women's Club 115th Annual Art Exhibition (Juried)
Des Moines Women's Club
Des Moines, IA
2025
The Other Art Fair (Juried)
Los Angeles, CA
2024
Affordable Art Exhibition (Juried)
CityArts Orlando Orlando, FL
2023
The Other Art Fair (Juried)
Arti Fact Events Chicago Chicago, IL
2022
Iowa Exhibited XXXVII (Juried)
Polk County Heritage Gallery Des Moines, IA
Awards & Recognition
2025
Selected for Judging — Mount Dora Arts Festival, Mount Dora, FL
2024
Award of Honor — ArtWorks of Eau Gallie Fine Arts Festival, Melbourne, FL
2023 - Present
Selected and featured by Saatchi Art's editorial team :
Handpicked to show at The Other Art Fair presented by Saatchi Art in Chicago, Los Angeles
Artist featured by Saatchi Art in a collection
Press & Publications
"ARTIST settles in Urbandale - Art community a big draw"
Collections
Andrew M. Economos, Ph.D. — Sarasota, Florida
Mounzer Nasr and Beatriz Martins Flecha de Lima Nasr — Virginia, USA
