The Search for an Individual Voice

Abstract This article focusses on Fatma Shanan, one of the groundbreaking Druze women artists in Israel. The article presents an analysis of four of the artist’s self-portraits, made between the years 2010–2017, relating to Shanan’s work as an emotional process. The authors examine how the artist relates to the complexity of her experience as a woman and as an artist active within the patriarchal Druze community and as a woman artist from an ethnic minority acting in the Israeli Western-oriented artworld. The article looks at her struggle through her intersectional experience and studies the strategies of action she has used in this struggle, focusing on the artist undergoing process of transformation from being a young student and artist (functioning under this multiple oppression) to her identification of herself as an individual artist and a pioneering feminist.