حوار academic freedom— their right to teach us as they saw fit, not as administrators told them to. The accomplishments of the American working class permeated Midwestern society without flavors of propaganda. Has being both Palestinian and American ever been an asset in getting your message heard by different audiences, or has it more often felt like a tension you have to manage? Being Palestinian and living in America made me feel that I belonged to many places rather than fully to one. In time, I came to understand that we live at the violent dawn of capitalist and imperial rule; I also knew that the age of nations was only a few centuries old; and I could see that the future would be far more international. If an airplane could take me anywhere in the world to see art or explore a distant library, why would I opt to be narrow?
My loving loyalty to Palestine is strong, but I do see the world, and I am gladly influenced by all I see. The more I matured, the more I was able to recognize and grant dignity to that part of me shaped by the good things that are American. In doing so, I embrace an ethic far larger than myself, because identity propaganda is everywhere, and I have had to consider it. I concluded that it was essentially reactionary in intention— to divide and rule on the social level, while on the individual level it sought to isolate and individualize.
A NAIVE HOPEFUL, ADRIFT
In the mid-20th century, few women were taken seriously as abstract painters, let alone in new media. Did you have to prove yourself in ways your male contemporaries didn’ t?
It is true that in New York, the art world in the mid-20th century, at the height of the Abstract Expressionist movement, accepted few women— and, to add fuel to the fire, being Palestinian added cultural significance to my femaleness. It was, of course, hard to hold on to my truth in this context, but I knew I was the artist, not the administrative layers that control the arts in capitalist society. The New York art scene had brought me to that city as a naive hopeful, but after I left Yale, I was adrift and surprised by the economic and social isolation it brought— not fear of poverty, but a total detachment from the social order. In time, this freedom became deeply liberating. I took two paths: first, I separated from the New York art world; second, I looked for another community in greater New York to connect with. I found that the Arabs of greater New York were in motion at that time, and I became a heavy-duty activist for Palestine. Witness the plethora of political posters and banners that are part of my visual legacy.
TANGIBLE PROOF TO ACT UPON
When an exhibition is canceled, what happens in your studio the next morning?
Mondrian Boogie Woogie, 2016, acrylic on jute, 176.7 × 254 cm Courtesy of the artist and Sfeir-Semler Gallery Beirut / Hamburg
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