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# A Note on the Cover Image
- URL: https://www.merip.org/2026/08/a-note-on-the-cover-image-12/
- Published: 2026-08-20T12:53:56.000Z
- Updated: 2026-08-20T13:54:02.000Z
- Author: (Author not identified)
- Tags: issue 319, #Starter

Manal Mahamid’s silkscreen print, *48 Cacti, 2024,* boldly introduces the themes of our summer 2026 issue, “Art at Work—People, Power and Cultural Production.” The fruit of the *sabr* cactus, or prickly pear, is repeated 48 times in a colorful grid. Each element is meaningful: the number 48, this particular plant and the Pop Art style.

Mahamid, a Palestinian artist living and working outside her homeland, explains, “The number 48 inevitably evokes 1948, the Nakba, but it also refers to the generation and community of Palestinians who remained on their land after that historical rupture.”

Due to the historical use of the cactus as a living barrier around villages and its current existence in the landscape, she describes the *sabr* plant as “both a living witness and a natural archive” that holds different meanings. “It has become associated with Palestinian attachment to the land because it continues to grow where villages once stood, silently marking places that have otherwise disappeared. At the same time, the cactus embodies resilience, not as a romantic notion of suffering, but as the quiet persistence of life despite violence, erasure and displacement." 

On her choice of visual style, Mahamid explains that Pop Art “historically transformed familiar and repeated images into powerful cultural symbols. By repeating the cactus in bold colors and graphic forms, I wanted to shift it from being simply a botanical image into an icon that invites viewers to question how symbols are constructed, circulated and politically understood.”

For Mahamid, and as many articles in this issue also reveal, art is “a space where personal memory, collective history and contemporary political realities can intersect without becoming fixed or closed.”