This exhibition brings together ceramic artists of Palestinian descent, coming from diverse backgrounds yet connected through our shared heritage. The work in this show will highlight the injustices that Palestinians have endured under 77 years of occupation and displacement, including the ongoing genocide, and share the richness of Palestinian culture with the NCECA and Detroit communities.

Detroit is the ideal location for this show, as Dearborn is home to one of the largest Arab-American populations in the United States. The Palestinian narrative is often silenced, censored, or distorted through propaganda. Clay becomes our way to hold onto memory, to resist erasure, and to stay rooted in Palestine.

Amidst colonial attempts at memoricide, ongoing attempts to erase colonized cultures and the traumas they have endured from public memory, we assert that memory lives on through making. Our artwork keeps memories of Palestine alive in collective consciousness. As ceramic artists, our artwork carries on aspects of our culture, ensuring that it isn’t erased through time. By transforming aspects of our traditions and our heritage into ceramic, we give it the power to be preserved, as ceramic has a unique ability to persist through weather and time.

As Palestinian Americans, we live with the daily tension of funding the genocide of our people through our tax dollars. We carry generational trauma, guilt, and grief, but also pride in the richness and beauty of our culture. This exhibition will display the nuance of living with both truths. It speaks to our pain, but also to our history, our land, and our dedication to resistance. Our existence and refusal to forget is a form of resistance that can never be taken away or censored.

NCECA’s mission to share “volumes of ceramic voices” would be incomplete without featuring the often censored voice of Palestinians who are commonly misrepresented or erased from popular narratives altogether. This show creates space for our reality and our voices to be seen and heard by the NCECA community.

Many people do not know Palestine beyond the headlines. They have never danced dabke at a Palestinian wedding, never been embraced and called habibti, never sat on a couch covered in tatreez pillows, spent the morning rolling grape leaves, flipped a maqluba, taken that first bite of knafeh, or sat down at a table covered in delicacies that a Palestinian family spent days preparing for them. This show invites viewers to see the Palestine that we have always known, full of beauty, resilience, and life. Through our work, we offer a fragment of that world, one that we know will someday be normalized and allowed to exist freely on the land where it belongs.