Artist, Illustrator and archivist

I specialize in charcoal drawn portraits. I also work as an archivist of art and photography. Based in Brooklyn, NY.

Education: B.A. Fine arts and Art History from Barnard College, Columbia University.

See my artist statement below.

Holding and Being Held

The precise horror and urgency of the genocide in Gaza requires us to bear witness. I am Jewish and anti-Zionist, and I do not feel that I can make art about anything else.

When no place is safe from bombs, bullets or starvation, Palestinian parents hold their children close to try to protect them, and in the most excruciating moments, to cradle their bodies one last time.

I struggle with the question of how to honor and mourn with these families, aware that the attempt could fall right into a pattern of insensitivity and exploitation. Photographs of violence can do even more to traumatize and strip control from their subjects. As Ken Gonzales-Day reminds us in his “Erased Lynching” series, “the photograph can record, but it’s not necessarily truthful.”

My images derive from the photographs that flash across my news screens showing Palestinian people in their most vulnerable, life-breaking moments. I have highlighted images of holding and being held so that this tender gesture does not compete with the devastation that surrounds it.

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I use very simple, ephemeral media. The fragility of charcoal across corrugated paper—this is my subversion of the digital image. Removing any depiction of a lifeless body, I show the stark absence that takes its place. On my studio desk, a roll of butcher paper that looks as if it might be discarded becomes the surface for my unfinished, frenetic sketches of Palestinians holding their loved ones close. Through the overwhelm, I reckon with the absence that is implied: the drawings here are only fragments of a much more complex story, happening out of our view.

I am influenced by the art that reaches me here from Gaza: children’s illustrations that convey the trauma of growing up under bombs, poems that describe the pressure of writing what may be one’s final words on earth. These elegies are lasting. I receive them with a sense of obligation to share their reach further.

This project is not only a memorial. It is a counter-memorial that bears witness to the dehumanization of Palestinian people and the suffering of parents and their children. They deserve to be held endlessly. My drawings insist on dignity and love that no amount of bombs can obliterate.