THEA ABU EL-HAJ

EXCAVATING MEMORY

ON DISPLAY AT AL-BUSTAN SEEDS OF CULTURE GALLERY, SEPTEMBER - OCTOBER 2023

Thea Abu El-Haj is a Palestinian-American artist whose work excavates personal and collective narratives of loss, exile, and resistance, even as it celebrates the beauty and joy around us.

Thea Abu El-Haj is an anthropologist and Professor in Education at Barnard College, Columbia University. An accomplished artist and writer, her research explores questions about belonging, rights, citizenship, and education raised by globalization, transnational migration, and conflict. Her second book, Unsettled Belonging: Educating Palestinian Youth after 911, won the 2016 American Educational Studies Association Critics Choice Award. Thea has published her research in many scholarly journals, including Anthropology and Education Quarterly, Harvard Educational Review, Comparative Education Review, and the Journal for Education in Emergencies. She has been the recipient of multiple grants from the Spencer Foundation. This year, she received a Spencer grant for “Disruption Dispossrssion: Teaching Palestine in Exile, 1970 - 1919,” - an oral history project with Palestinian teachers in Lebanon. She currently divides her time between Philadelphia, New York, and Vermont, teaching, researching, writing, and making visual art. She has a long history with Al-Bustan as a teacher, researcher, advisor to the board and parent of campers.

Thea Abu El-Haj’s artwork is a powerful reflection of her research and lived experience. Her nuanced attention to light, color, and texture points to a rich and complex history, offering us a glimpse of her world inviting us to consider new perspectives and scratch a little deeper beyond the surface of what we see.

“I am drawn to the imprint of human history on the natural landscape. Growing up in Iran and Lebanon and spending time with my family in Palestine, the colors, quality of light, and traces of millennia of human presence found there resonates through my work, even as the landscapes of the Northeastern U.S., where I have lived my adult life, influence what I paint. Buildings and stone walls in the process of decay, light coming through dark and dark through light, and the quality of color at different times of day are all sources for my work. These contemporary sources of inspiration meld with an embodied history of other places and other times that live on within me.” -Thea Abu El-Haj