This article presents an overview of Palestinian exhibition making in the twentieth century. It addresses an absence of academic engagement with how, starting in the 1920s, a repertoire of Palestinian pedagogical and representational materials, temporary and makeshift spaces, and multiple protodiplomatic and unionized efforts under the Palestinian Liberation Organization informed a culture of exhibition making that created critical sites for: cultivating and critiquing taste within art movements and among Palestinians; operationalizing national sentiment and political consciousness; and mobilizing international support around the legitimacy of the Palestinian cause. Specifically, the article accounts for the Palestinian mobilization of exhibitions in response to European and Zionist expansionism (1917–48), as a social praxis of community building and resilience (1948–64), and as a form of political resistance through the radical internationalization of Palestinian cultural affairs (1964–87). It culminates with a discussion of the first intifada and the morphing of exhibition culture into the Palestinian Authority’s state-building project following the Oslo Accords (1987–93).
