How this mother-daughter duo became partners in art
Amneh Baagour, who grew up in Lebanon's Beddawi refugee camp, became her artist daughter's best student.
RAMALLAH, West Bank — Amneh Baagour's career as a mosaic artist started seven years ago when her daughter, a post-graduate art student, rejected Baagour's offer to help her daughter with her projects. Today, the works of the 67-year-old autodidact mother and her academic daughter, Kinan el-Rubaie, are often displayed side by side in exhibitions.
Baagour makes mosaics. Rubaie, an artist with a Ph.D. in art education from Egypt’s Helwan University in Greater Cairo, uses various media such as photography to clay. Together they have held a number of joint exhibitions, including one in Cairo in 2013 and the Phoenix Exhibition in Palestine in 2016. Both love to use Palestinian symbols such as horses, fish, eyes or olive branches in their works.
Baagour has been interested in crafts ever since her childhood in Lebanon's Beddawi refugee camp. She was born into a family of Palestinians evicted from Jaffa in 1948; the family’s means were small, and toys and books were rare. She was taught to sew at the refugee camp. She also learned embroidery and even how to cut hair, thanks to a teacher at the camp who worked with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East.
When Baagour turned 18 in 1970, she got married and left the camp to live with her husband in the southern Lebanese village of Chebaa, where they had four daughters. They then lived briefly in Tunisia and returned to the Gaza Strip in the 1990s after the establishment of the Palestinian Authority.
