Getting ready to install our final show for 2013, and planning for the annual Souk (on December 7), I couldn’t help but take stock of the lively year of exhibitions we have had in 2013.
You may have noted that the gallery is now called The Jerusalem Fund Gallery Al-Quds. This addition helps to place us in context as we continue to present the art of Palestinians, Arabs and Arab Americans, as well as non-Arabs whose work touches on the Middle East.
Starting out the year we exhibited Lukman Ahmad’s A Small Hope and a Bullet, colorful paintings exploring Kurdish symbols, arts and music, which brought new viewers to the gallery, while in February former Foreign Service Officer Bud Hensgen’s Palestine Interrupted paintings’ semi-abstract forms were a haunting testimony to his life-changing visit to Palestine.
In the spring, the Break the Silence Media and Art Project Undefeated Despair, Precarity, Public Art and Solidarity in Palestine and Lebanon filled the Gallery with giant murals from projects in Gaza, Shatila Camp, the West Bank and Olympia, Washington.
In April we held our first glass exhibit, with Corinne Whitlatch’s stunning large-scale stained glass sculptures, Visual Musings on a Search for Peace, about Hebron, Beit Jala, and other Palestinian and Middle East subjects. Her exhibit included a glass piece dedicated to her friend, Hanan Ashrawi, and a fascinating power point talk that included images of her sabbatical in Bethlehem teaching local women and men to make new items for the tourist market using broken window glass, bottles and scrap from the glass-blowers of Hebron. One of her student’s success stories was a topic of “Bethlehem Besieged: Stories of Hope in Times of Trouble” by Lutheran Pastor Mitri Raheb of Bethlehem.
In May I was approached to coordinate an exhibition in Massachusetts, Kairos Palestine Program Art Exhibition, which featured and sold the work of Gallery artists Helen Zughaib, Manal Deeb, Adib Fattal, Elia Kahvedjian, Elena Farsakh and Adnan Charara.
Summer showcased Palestinian artist Vian Shamounki’s Hopes and Dreamspaintings of Jerusalem, with a fabulous extra—I invited Palestinian oud player Fuad Foty to accompany Vian at the opening, as she painted to his music, a portrait of Mahmoud Darwish, from start to finish in front of more than 100 people in our lecture room. The portrait became her gift to us.
In September-October, our annual concept show was called The Map is Not the Territory, Parallel Paths: Palestinians, Native Americans, Irish. Conceived and co-curated by Jennifer Heath of Baksun Arts for Social Justice in Colorado, this show has been under construction for 18 months. A juried exhibit, we chose 39 national and international artists out of over 150 who applied. The artists produced 64 paintings, photographs, films and artist books on the subject of the profound historical and contemporary connections and commonalities among the three cultures. Major artists, such as Hani Zurob, a Gaza artist now in Paris, recently the subject of a major book by Kamal Boullata and winner of the prestigious Renoir prize, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, the most important contemporary Native American artist today, whose work is in the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan, the Smithsonian and many other museums, and Rita Duffy, featured at London’s Tate Gallery, participated in exploring themes of occupation, identity, land, and conflict. This exhibition will travel around the world for the next 5 years. Venues will be announced on our website. An opening evening featuring live musicians playing oud, Irish fiddle and Native American songs with rattles drew over 300 visitors. We were privileged to have three of the show’s artists, Mona El-Bayoumi, Phoebe Farris and Helen Zughaib, participate in a panel discussion about their work and the themes of the show. We also featured Jean Luc Goddard’s film, Notre Musique, with its interview with Mahmoud Darwish, as part of the ancillary programming for the show. In November, another MAP artist, John Halaka, will lecture about his project, Forgotten Survivors, and give us a preview of his solo exhibit at the Gallery in 2014.
At the end of October, photographer Amr Mounib showcases his mixed media photography, Fabric of a Nation, a fascinating and somewhat surreal look at Egypt, as part of my collaboration with FOTOWEEK DC, a yearly event in which the Smithsonian and other galleries and institutions all over town feature photography. The event brings thousands of people to Washington to see the exhibitions, and our Gallery will be featured in all the event publicity.
I was approached by the Kansas City Museum of Art for their Artists’ Coalition show, Islamic Exchange. They had seen our Gallery online and wanted me to recommend some artists for this major show. In the end, Corinne Whitlatch and Helen Zughaib were invited to participate.
We have a full calendar for 2014. Put us on yours!
