In "Embroidery Art," Refugee Artists Weave A Story Of Resilience

Top: Ruba Al Behery (sketch by Amal Abu Hussain), "Palestinian henna party  حفلة الحنة الفلسطينية". Bottom: A traditional Palestinian embroidery sampler woven by Nawal Ibrahim Al-Ahmad (on blue background) and a "Hellenistic Rooster"  inspired by the Marisa Tomb Paintings and embroidered by Alia Abu-Rabia. Lucy Gellman Photos; all art by refugee artists in the Palestinian History Tapestry Project.

 The women’s excitement is palpable even from across the gallery. At the left of the image, a single figure stands in profile, an earthenware bowl of warmed wax between her palms. Her thobe glows in vivid reds and pinks; braids of color run up and down the long black cotton of her outfit. Beside her, 16 women look out onto the room: their eyes wide over a sea of vibrant color.

Many press their palms together; some extend their arms, embroidered limbs overlapping. A hand reaches out to squeeze another hand. A delicate border makes its way around the work, mirroring the brightly stitched Tatreez that adorns their outfits.

The work, a rendering of a Palestinian henna party, is one of 40 pieces in Embroidery Art of Palestinian Women, a collaboration between the Oxford-based Palestinian History Tapestry Project and Woodbridge-based Palestine Museum US showcasing embroidered panels by Palestinian women living in refugee camps. Drawn from scenes across Palestinian history, the works tell a story of resilience, preservation, and diaspora, blending past and present in a way that feels much bigger than a single gallery or museum space in Connecticut.

The exhibition runs through the end of April at the Palestine Museum, nestled in an office park at 1764 Litchfield Turnpike in Woodbridge. Hours and more information are available here.

“I just want people to see it,” said museum Founder and Director Faisal Saleh on a recent walkthrough of the show, lingering beside a scene of camels at the Port of Jaffa. “This is a very special kind of Palestinian artistry—taking a scene and turning it into embroidery, it’s a way to document history. It combines the labor of these Palestinian women in refugee camps, who are living under really austere conditions, with the importance of visibility.”

That begins with the Palestinian History Tapestry Project itself, which has blossomed into over 100 panels (and counting; more on that below) in a little over a decade. In 2012, former UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East) staffer Jan Chalmers co-founded the initiative as a way to support Palestinian women living in refugee camps, where resources were and are often very stretched. While the women are paid, the other people working on the project are largely volunteers.

Top: Faisal Saleh with "Parental Protection," embroidered by Nawal Ibrahim al Ahmed. The panel is inspired by a photo reproduced by BBC News, in which Jamal Al-Durrah tries to shield his 12-year-old son, Muhammad Al-Durrah, from gunfire. Muhammad was ultimately shot and killed at the Netzarim Junction. Bottom: "The Right of Return" (top panel), designed by Fatma Abu Owda and embroidered by Hanan Al-Behery and "Mosaic at Khirbet El-Mafjar, 734 CE," embroidered by Basma Al-Natoor.

“I invited a couple of friends from the U.K. to explore with me the possibilities of doing a project with Palestinian women, and helping them tell their story about the land, the people who lived there, and what they left behind,” Chalmers said in a 2020 interview with the Middle East Monitor. She also enlisted historians Mahmoud Hawari and Ghada Karmi, who advised on the chronology and helped pick several scenes to launch the project. Since its beginnings, several of the artists have also had the chance to weigh in on the content of the panels.

Now, “there are artists, and there are writers, and there are just people who generally want to lend a hand,” Chalmers said. Currently, the project’s artists include women in Lebanon, Jordan, the occupied West Bank, and Gaza among other places.

True to that original vision, the show uses its platform to document, celebrate and advocate for a people and a place, turning the installation into a cultural portal. When a viewer enters the gallery, they are surrounded with panels on all slides, from renderings of the  "Mona Lisa of Galilee" and the Birth of Jesus Christ to a bright, rainbow-patterned rendering of Ibrahim Tuqan’s poem “Mawtini” (“My Homeland”). On the floor, rose petals spill from baskets arranged in a half moon, a remnant of last year’s “Liturgy for Gaza” on a Blake Street playground. 

Throughout, refugee artists balance a long, sometimes tender history with their own craftsmanship, giving viewers a crash course in several centuries of civics. There is, for instance, Hadeel Abu Rabia’s rendering of Napoleonic troops at Acre/Akka, which in March 1799 became a tactical and military nightmare (and ultimately, an embarrassing defeat) for the French. There is a trio of camels at the Port of Jaffa, carrying crates of oranges in a design inspired by the 20th-century posters of British artist Frank Newbould. There is the 1917 British capture of Jerusalem, during which the city—long under Ottoman control—came under both martial law and British occupation for what would ultimately be decades.

If it can feel heavy, that’s part of the point: The exhibition is not apolitical, nor does it attempt to be (although if it has a bias, it seems to be on the side of humanity and survival). There are nods to the BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) movement, the founding of UNRWA in 1949, the existence and growth of political movements like the Palestine Liberation Organization or PLO. There are maps showing the disappearance of Palestinian land between 1948 and 1967, a 20-year period that began with the Nakba and ended in the Arab-Israeli War.

Top: "The Land of Sad Oranges," embroidered by Suheer Abu Rabia. Bottom: "Homeless family, Gaza assault, 2008—9," enbroidered by Iman Shehaby and inspired by artwork by English artist Peter Rhoades.

There is a recognition of the long and painful destruction of Bedouin villages and works that show a decades-old pattern of forced migration, as family members stumble through the rubble of Gaza with their belongings in tow. There is a rendering of people, wide-eyed and afraid, at a military checkpoint like those in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Many of the panels commemorate events in the last century and well before it too, a reminder that this conflict over land and lives did not start recently at all.

On one wall, for instance, Chalmers’ own embroidered copy of the 1917 Balfour Declaration  sits alongside a cross-stitched version of the UN General Assembly’s Resolution 194, a 1948 document that granted Palestinian refugees the right to return to their homes and “live at peace with their neighbours.”

It captures a significant historical moment (or constellation of moments): the Balfour Declaration voiced British support for a home for the Jewish people in Palestine, at a time when the modern-day Zionist movement, helmed by Theodor Herzl, was just squeaking into its second decade. For many Palestinians, it was and is also a symbol of displacement and attempted ethnic cleansing, the first in a long line of 20th-century mandates that allowed the removal of people from their homes and their land.

The resolution, meanwhile, came just months after the Nakba, or the mass, forced expulsion of close to a million Palestinians from their land in the late 1940s, as Israel moved from a concept to a country that gained global recognition. Regardless of the right to safely return that it stated, “none of that happened,” Saleh said, his lips pressed into a thin, hard line. Over seven decades later, many Palestinians (including many of the artists in the museum’s broader collection) still identify as a people in exile, living across a painful and evolving diaspora.

There is something deeply moving in many of these pieces, especially those that lend a heartbeat to a conflict too often boiled down to talking points and protest slogans and data sets. In “Boys On The Beach, Gaza Assault, 2014”, artists Shaimaa Hasanain and Mayyada Abu Sitta have memorialized four cousins, all killed in an Israeli airstrike 11 years ago. From where it hangs, the work pulls a viewer in, the woven water shimmering in oranges, blues and pinks of sky and sunset. 

From the gentle waves, the long reflections of four boys stretch back onto the sand, one kicking a soccer ball as the others run around him. If a person leans in close enough, they can almost hear that sweet, sun-kissed little kid laughter, the way it blooms between bodies with a toothy grin. For a moment—or maybe several—it’s hard not to want to bottle this moment, not to think of what comes next. 

But this is not a peaceful scene: the panel memorializes the untimely deaths of Ahed Atef Bakr, Zakaria Ahed Bakr, Mohamed Ramez Bakr, and Ismael Mohamed Bakr, all cousins who were playing on a fishing beach in Gaza City when an Israeli airstrike killed them in 2014. By showing them in reverse—as if they have been flipped upside down—it gives a weight to the very human cost of violence and war. These are four young boys that were, and are no longer.

It is a reminder, perhaps, that the world is big and complex enough to hold multiple griefs, particularly in this current and tumultuous political moment. There is the grief of a people living in both fear and diaspora; the grief of children not able to play openly and safely; the grief that this trauma seems like a never-ending loop. In its humanity, the piece reminds us that it is necessary to recognize each life as a life—to push back against the de-humanization of any people, including the tens of thousands of Israelis calling for a ceasefire in Gaza.

Top: "The Hand of Fatima/Mary/Miriam   يد فاطمة / ماري/ مريم ," selected from traditional designs by Riham Khalil and embroidered by Iman Shehaby. Bottom: "Mawtini (My Homeland)," designed by Ibrahim Muhtadi and embroidered by Jamela al-Bura’ai. 

From halfway across the gallery, the work seems to speak directly to Iman Shehaby’s “The Hand of Fatima/Mary/Miriam ( يد فاطمة / ماري/ مريم),” meant to remind viewers that we as humans have more in common than we may think. The symbol is immediately recognizable to practicants of all three Abrahamic faiths: what may be a symbol of Miriam to a Jewish person is a tribute to Fatima, daughter of the Prophet Muhammad, to a Muslim, and a nod to Mary, Mother of Jesus, to a Christian. It was completed in the Ain al-Hilweh refugee camp in Lebanon, a reminder, too, that all three of these faiths share a history of persecution and diaspora.

Some of the most moving works in the show, like this one, are those that capture intangible history: tender, lush portraits of the olive harvest, black-and-white interpretations of poetry by Mahmoud Darwish, an homage to the mosaics at Khirbat al-Mafjar, depictions of dazzling tatreez and joyful henna parties, a traditional embroidery sampler cross-stitched in bright red thread. In this sense, the substrate is part of the artwork: to talk about embroidery is to talk about Palestinian history, culture, and resilience across and in a diaspora.

Take, for instance, “The Land of Sad Oranges,” inspired by the eponymous story by 20th century writer Ghassan Kanafani. In the story, Kanafani writes about the Nakba from a child’s perspective, laying bare the anguish of a childhood interrupted by violence. Here, oranges are oranges, but they are also a metaphor for home: he sees them reflected in his parents’ eyes as they flee, a loss so hard to quantify that he spends the story trying to do it.

Or in Khawla Dahrouj’s (sketch by Shaymaa Abu-Hasanain and design by Ibrahim Muhtadi) “Popular Resistance,” based on Mazin Qumsiyeh’s 2011 book of the same name. In the book, Qumsiyeh spends significant time chronicling Palestinian history, including centuries under Ottoman, British, and Israeli occupation. What sets his record apart, perhaps, is a focus on non-violent protest movements not always (or often) covered in mainstream media accounts. 

Or as the Jewish-American writer Anna Baltzer wrote after reading the text, the book "expose[s] the misguided claims that Palestinians have never tried nonviolence; in fact, they are among the experts, whose courage, creativity, and resilience are an inspiration to people of conscience everywhere.”

For Saleh, that humanity is part of a longer-term vision for the show. This year, he is working with staff at the Palestinian History Tapestry to commission 100 new panels “just about the genocide in Gaza,” as well as settler violence that has exploded in the West Bank, he said. In so doing, he hopes to both support refugee artists and document the present in a way that centers Palestinian voices.

“I want each one to tell a story,” he said. “People just don’t realize how special this thing is, how fortunate we are [to have it here].”

It comes as he is also laying the groundwork for a satellite of the museum in Edinburgh, and a project at the 2026 Venice Biannale. Three years ago, in 2022, the museum made history when it was tapped for a “collateral event” at the Biannale. As he works toward both of those projects, he also plans to find sponsorships for the tapestry panels, giving people the option to have their name embroidered into the piece. 

The Palestine Museum US is located at 1764 Litchfield Turnpike in Woodbridge. Hours and more information are available here.