THE INTIMIDATION OF DEED
IF YOU DON’T ACT, someone else will decide everything. Borders and maps are an abstract painting created by world leaders, and the rest of us buy it; a good painter knows when to stop. All the man-made barriers are artificial things. Who said any of that can’t involve intervention? Isn’t that what all art is—intervention into space, nature, materials, presence, movement, and ideas? Well, so is activism, except activists are less fixated on originality than artists are. Both of these disciplines are self-reflexive; they have no start or end to their lifelong journey; and they require reconsideration of the notions that came before them.
There are quintessential behaviors that get associated with artists and activists, such as the painter who applies pigment to canvas or the activist who chants at demonstrations. But in fact, a guerrilla gardener is behaving as both artist and activist simultaneously. There are no rules for art and activism other than to challenge the status quo.
Those who attempt to distance themselves from the bureaucracy assembled on their behalf with the nauseating, privileged whine of “I’m not political” do so because they think compassion alone may not be enough. But that’s what I relished most about my poppy paintings being held at the peace protests—the number of people who intentionally showed up without any signs or flags but accepted a painting to hold from a stranger. Perhaps it was because they were fond of the painting alone or the fact it was detached from yet another nationalistic symbol they resist subscribing to. Either way, it gave them an opportunity to stand next to one another and agree to something in a setting they felt was under the umbrella of peace.
I THINK OF SISTER CORITA KENT first as an artist, second as a nun, but her legacy at large speaks to what she endured in asserting her belief in shared creativity. That’s activism.
I began making poppy paintings this past October in my Saint Louis studio, almost as quick warm-ups. The recipe calls for a cadmium-yellow base, followed by cadmium red, crimson red, and olive green for the flower. My friend had asked me if I wanted to join her at the first demonstration, held at the start of October. I remembered that Sister Corita had encouraged marchers at parades in Los Angeles to carry the paintings they’d made, so I grabbed a poppy painting I’d just finished painting in my studio and handed it to my mother to hold over her head. We live in polarizing times. So many flags and slogans come with baggage attached, which people are conditioned to read in a particular way, through a certain lens. I thought that in the twenty-first century we need new symbols that can belong to us, with new meanings we can assign to them.
As I kept showing up to demonstrations over the course of several months, I began distributing the paintings among my community—the community I was helping to build simply through my participation. My mom brought a wagon to one demonstration to wheel my paintings around in. People would hold my poppy paintings aloft with me for the duration of the march and then return them afterward. I started doing this in other cities that I visited, too. I brought paintings with me in my roller bag, should I come across a demonstration taking place. It felt like a double-Dutch marathon. (I presume everyone is familiar with the playground game, where you have to keep pace with the rope holders and match their rhythm.)
I didn’t have any expectations of how long I would be making poppy paintings. My practice had become intertwined with the grief I faced daily. As I’d witnessed the poppies blooming in Palestine, I wanted to take every poppy painting from my studio and have it held up at a demonstration. It felt like a new spring. Not just because the reds and yellows of the paintings outnumbered the colors of the flag, but because the demographic of the protesters had completely changed. I have been attending these gatherings since the days when I was in a stroller and have witnessed their evolution over time. I thought about how ironic it was that every city I’d traveled to was holding some sort of vigil, protest, march, or rally. Every city except the very one we are all standing up for, because of the consequences its citizens would suffer for speaking their truth.
This Simone Weil quote resonates: “Two prisoners whose cells adjoin communicate with each other by knocking on the wall. The wall is the thing which separates them but is also their means of communication. It is the same with us and God. Every separation is a link.”
Not to be naive, but I would like to think art can be that link among us, too. We find beauty and merit in these objects. The consensus we build around their importance to us is a feeling shared. The back of each poppy painting is labeled RETURN TO SAJ. RETURN TO PALESTINE. It is not only an order for what to do with the painting afterward, but also a manifestation for each protester to exercise their God-given right to experience the “Promised Land,” the land that has been relentlessly lacerated by every accord.
The poppy march was not just an installation or performance; it was an orchestra. I appreciated most how strangers allowed me to be a composer—not that I was concerned about wanting control in any way, but I determined what variables I wanted to arrange, and they naturally scattered themselves in the field of a peace march. I was really impressed with the yield that was returned to me out of 150 paintings: 100 percent. I have to give credit to my mom, though, as she was the one chasing down folks attempting to walk away with them.
The process for this series has been very intuitive. I sat with them in my studio all laid out on the floor. I began to rip them off their individual stretchers and arrange them in a tenacious composition. I stitched them together and assembled them on a larger stretcher bar. I want the viewer to be overwhelmed by a tribe of flora filling their peripheral vision.
I WANTED TO APPROACH my practice differently from how I had in grad school. I set up my studio on the ground level of my parents’ home in Beitin, a rural village on the outskirts of Ramallah. It was July 2023, and I could already sense the tension and hostility in the air. I thought to myself that a war was about to break out, and that I would have to determine where it would be most productive to be situated. So I moved back home to Saint Louis.
When January 2024 came, I received news that my grandfather was in poor health and that it was urgent for all of his kids to see him. I determined it would be best to escort my mom abroad, given the dangerous circumstances. When we arrived in Beitin, I was graced with my grandfather’s embrace. How sad that this moment was spoiled by reminders of reality.
I found everything in my studio just as I’d left it. A large cloth sheet covered the table, paints, brushes, cart, etc., preventing them from collecting dust. Every dawn I’d start the day with a lap around the village, surveying the segregated land and the sky we are forced to share. The ground was vibrantly green, and every day the sky would change to various shades of dusty phosphorus and cool gray. I was less than fifty miles from the other apartheid wall.
Cutting through Beitin is a road with a checkpoint that the locals call the DCO. It leads to Ramallah, the nearest metropolitan region, where everyone goes for leisure and shopping. Ordinarily, a sequence of billboards on the median strip welcomes visitors with advertisements. When I was there in August 2023 the road was accessible to everyone; when I was there in January it was closed to Palestinians. I couldn’t help but notice large cloth sheets draped over the billboards. That sight mimicked the veiling of furniture in the home of every diaspora family—and also my studio the way I found it—whose members aspired to one day return to the motherland. The sheets also recalled the way you might cover a dead body, only here it was the death of corporate media. I supposed the advertisers stopped paying for their billboards after the war broke out and the owner of this ad space didn’t want to give away free marketing. I had to laugh at how the mechanisms of capitalism persist even in the midst of civil unrest.
I accepted the invitation to remove the blank sheets from the billboard structures and make paintings on them in my studio. How am I going to make fun of this moment? I’m going to control visibility in a climate that squashes our perspective. I thought about David Hammons’s tarp paintings and his attempt to work with what others might consider erasure: not exactly the opposite of his tarp paintings, yet something to do with redaction, redacting the negation of normality, that visual pollution of cheap ads that signified daily living in peacetime.
I wasn’t going to overthink what to make for this billboard project; the act was meaning enough. I painted some Rothkoesque backgrounds. On one I wrote in Arabic THE REVOLUTION IS FEMALE. After I’d returned to America, some older men approached my uncle because they knew I was the culprit behind this guerrilla art project. Their main question wasn’t about resistance or the need to have a voice, but my claim that the revolution would be carried out by women. They suspected misandry in my word choice. It was then that I realized how difficult it can be to unite people in ways unfamiliar to them. Even the underrepresented self-police with the caution of a co-op board—and we wonder why it’s impossible to move things forward.
ON ANOTHER MORNING WALK, I sat on the edge of my village, admiring the view of Jerusalem from afar and all the valleys that lay before it. Without context, it appeared that only free rolling green land lay between me and the outskirts of Jerusalem. I imagined that ten-mile trek by foot would be such a divine experience, but the checkpoints and settlements in between make it impossible to reach. Technology can limit our freedoms, as our movements are more easily tracked by satellites, drones, and AI. Maybe it was the Frederic Edwin Church in me—the whole God-in-nature trip that drove the Hudson River School—but I set up camp with an easel, paints, and morning tea to paint en plein air.
About one hour into the painting of a meditative reflection on my ancestral land, my focus was interrupted: I spotted settlers on a road at the bottom of the hillside, pointing directly at me. Moments later, I was alarmed to see an IDF Wolf armoured vehicle drive down the road that leads to my village. A couple of weeks before, a man from my village named Khader ‘Alwan was shot dead on that hillside while selling olive oil. I didn’t want to take any chances by holding my position, so I abruptly packed up and left.
Freedom is the ability to see and breathe from a land that cultivates liquid gold from olive trees—trees that need no permission from the formidable name of the land beneath them to flourish. Those olive trees are much wiser than us all, and have had the enchantment of being abetted by my ancestors, who had the freedom to harvest the olives from Beitin to Jerusalem without meeting checkpoints. We turn to nature for answers when humanity fails to consider our worthiness. Inspired by Mahmoud Darwish, we can ask the question, Who is qualified to be “a lawyer for gardens and sand”? I suppose it is exclusively the caretakers of the land.
Free Palestine.
