The Artists :
Leena is a Palestinian architect, ceramic artist, and mother based in Boston, MA. She discovered her love of ceramics during COVID and spends her time in the studio making mostly functional, wheel thrown work. The simple, geometric forms coupled with detailed surface patterns are highly relevant in her work.
Included in this exhibit:
Leena Ismail
Marina Wahbeh
Car Nazzal
Car Nazzal (they/them) is a ceramic sculptor based in California. Moved by the liminal space of diaspora, their work explores Palestinian identity, queer expansiveness, and the layered complexities of the self. Informed by psychology, Nazzal gives form to the psyche's rebellious undercurrents, creating sculptures that challenge assumption and embrace contradiction.
Included in this exhibit:
Eman is a first generation Palestinian-American ceramic artist and teacher based in Atlanta, GA. She finds ways to add whimsy into her functional collection through vibrant glazes, abstract carvings and miniatures. Eman enjoys exploring the resilience of the natural world by altering wheel thrown pieces and pushing clay to its limit.
Included in this exhibit:
Eman Srouji
Leila Srouji
One thing led to another after taking a six week wheel throwing course in 2017 following college graduation. Seven years later and Leila has made ceramics one of the great loves of her life, creating pottery out of my tuff-shed-turned-tiny-pottery-studio in the foothills of Northern California. She couldn’t do any of it without the help of her husband Graham, and the companionship of their two pups, Libby & Zeitoun.
Included in this exhibit:
Amal Tamari
Amal Tamari (she/her) is a Palestinian-American craftsperson living in North Carolina. She is currently a Core Fellow at Penland School of Craft, taking workshops in the clay, textiles, and wood studios. Amal’s work focuses on finding splendor in everyday objects and capturing their beauty through still lifes. She often thinks about memory and home, and her imagery reflects these subjects. Her work straddles the line between functional and sculptural, and her clay works are always coil-pinched with deep red clay.
Included in this exhibit:
Pam Totah
Pam Totah is a Palestinian ceramic artist living in the San Francisco Bay Area. She spins her Palestinian ancestry and its stories into the clay, drawing inspiration from tatreez, a classical Palestinian embroidery art form that threads stories of place, identity, and cultural history into the cloth it adorns.
Claiming her Palestinian heritage has become a central focus throughout her work, honoring cultural traditions that continue to be taken, commodified, uprooted from their meaning and context, or erased. Integrating the story of her ancestry into her art has become a way to claim space for herself and for the rich history of Palestine.
Included in this exhibit:
Marina is a second-generation Palestinian-American ceramic artist, student studio tech and current BFA candidate at Northern Arizona University, based in Flagstaff, AZ. Her work primarily comprises functional ceramics, drawing on cultural identity and memory to explore community and connection in relation to my heritage.
Included in tis exhibit:
Zeit and Za’atar
Shay wa Qahwa ‘Tea and Coffee’
Coffee Pot with Olive Wood Handle
Karina Yanes
Karina’s work is a glimpse into an intangible world that she has always known. Many of us who are mixed carry this world with us; each of ours is different, but they all run parallel to one another. Growing up as a Puerto Rican-Palestinian-Midwesterner has always left Karina living in this world, at the intersection of three cultures. This world is complex, it lives on the edge of celebration and loss, reality and imagination, past and present, comfort and anxiety. In her practice, she creates and pieces together ceramic multiples, fragments, and tiles with collaged surfaces that imitate and hold onto traditions, icons, architecture, and language from her family’s oral histories, to keep them alive.
Included in the exhibit: