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A founding member of the League of Palestinian Artists, Nabil Anani has helped cultivate the contemporary arts movement in the Palestinian territories. His art is rooted in the soil, work, landscapes, architecture, religious identities, suffering, and resistance of Palestinians. It documents not only a people and a landscape but a collective psyche. Each work contains smaller works and worlds within—tiles, words, symbols, and documents of historical significance. In this painting, Holy Family, Anani places a familiar narrative into the realities of suffering and place.

How to depict the 12 disciples has long been a perplexing problem for illustrators of the Last Supper.  Artistic convention established that Peter should be presented as a curly-haired senior. John was often a beardless youth, leaning against Christ. Judas might be seated at the wrong side of the table, carrying his pouch with thirty pieces of blood money. But the remaining nine have come down to us in centuries of sacred art as a lineup of look-alikes.