This paper focuses on the Israeli social realist painter Gershon Knispel and his work in Brazil. Although he spent much of his youth on a kibbutz after fleeing Nazi Germany as a child, Knispel produced his formative work in Haifa, the port city where residents of diverse backgrounds—including Palestinians, Mizrahi and Sephardic Jews, and Holocaust survivors—formed “red Haifa,” a multi-ethnic, multi-national working-class coalition. In his large-scale works such as The Employment Bureau from 1956, Knispel portrayed a complex Israeli society that was opposed to the Israeli government’s vision of a homogenous national body politic. Knispel left Israel for Brazil in 1957 to work on a project for the Tupi TV station, which would commemorate the native peoples of Brazil. Knispel built a new home in Brazil, producing public works in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, which celebrated that nation’s ethnic diversity and its Indigenous traditions. He also established networks in the vibrant Brazilian artistic and cultural scene of the late fifties, befriending figures such as the architect Oscar Niemeyer, the poet Jorge Amado, and the painter Candido Portinari. In 1964, threatened by the newly-formed Brazilian military dictatorship, Knispel returned to Haifa, where he worked on a number of community-oriented projects and developed a series of works with the Palestinian artist Abed Abdi that would commemorate Land Day and calls for Palestinian solidarity across the Green Line. In this paper, I argue that Knispel’s time in pre-dictatorship Brazil influenced his later work in Israel and encouraged him to build deeper relations with the Palestinian community in Haifa upon his return. This paper exploring Knispel’s engagement in Brazil, and how his time there impacted his art and community-building initiatives when he returned, will provide a richer and more nuanced history of art in Israel-Palestine and the growth of transnational cultural networks during this period.