Why Omar Mismar is in the Design 100

Omar Mismar works in mosaic — an ancient technique associated with Roman floors and Byzantine walls — and turns it toward the present-day Middle East. Born in Lebanon in 1986 and based in Beirut, he assembles his images tessera by tessera, a slow, materially exacting process set deliberately against the speed of the news imagery his work often responds to. The gap between an old craft and urgent subject matter is the point: it asks viewers to look for as long as the piece took to make.

That approach reached a wider audience in 2024, when his mosaics featured at the Venice Biennale; his work has also been shown at MoMA in New York and at institutions across Beirut and the United States. For an artist working in a technique more often associated with restoration than contemporary art, that level of recognition matters: Mismar has made the case for mosaic as a genuine vehicle for political image-making, not a historical curiosity.