SAN FRANCISCO — It has been nearly a year and a half since the beginning of the Israeli bombardment of Palestine, which many organizations including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch are calling a genocide. While the oppression of the Palestinian people long predates these attacks, so, too, does the flourishing of humanity despite adverse conditions. From the River to the Bay at SOMArts Cultural Center in San Francisco makes a case for art as a celebratory form of resistance.
The exhibition, curated by Chris Gazaleh and up through March 30, features the work of 11 Palestinian and pro-Palestinian artists including Gazaleh, Ren Allathkani, Asma Ghanem, Hussam, Lucia Ippolito, Tarik Kazaleh, Eli Lippert, Diana Musa, SPIE ONE, Maria Fernanda Vizcaino, and the public art collective Break the Silence Mural Project, who work across mediums including painting, photography, installation, and video.
“The artists I included are friends and comrades,” Gazaleh told Hyperallergic of his curatorial debut. “Not everyone is necessarily an activist, but they’re all involved in their communities and cultural representation. I think cultural representation, with the right intent and education, is just as important as political education.”
At a time when Bay Area arts organizations have actively silenced pro-Palestinian artists or remained silent on the issue of Palestine themselves, this kind of exhibition could be seen as radical or daring. According to SOMArts’s Executive Director Maria Jenson, however, the show comes back to the organization’s founding principles.
“A cultural center is different from a museum or larger arts organization,” Jenson said. “There’s a mandate to serve the broader community. We continue to mount exhibitions that humanize communities that have historically been othered. We can’t go in a direction that feels watered down or safe.”
SOMArts’s history of platforming Palestinian artists and allies of the movement is proof positive. In 2005, the cultural center hosted the traveling exhibition Made in Palestine, the first exhibition of all-Palestinian contemporary artwork in the United States, organized by the Station Museum in Houston. In the last year alone, SOMArts mounted the exhibitions In Solidarity: Queer and Trans Artists for a Free Palestine and Bearing Witness: An Expression of Love, Solidarity, and Justice for the People of Palestine, the 2024 title of its annual Día de los Muertos exhibition.
“Most of the people that work here are part of the communities we support,” said SOMArts’s Gallery Director Carolina Quintanilla. “It doesn’t feel like we’re going out of our way to support freedom of expression when we’re supporting issues that are so close to us. It doesn’t take effort to support people advocating for their existence.”
From the River to the Bay celebrates Palestinian existence and persistence in a diverse range of manifestations. On one gallery wall, Gazaleh has painted the lines of a poem by Gazan poet Refaat Alareer, who was killed in an Israeli airstrike last year, in the shape and colors of a Palestinian flag. “If I die / you must live / to tell my story,” the text reads in Arabic script. In the center of the flag are pencil drawings by Gazaleh showing Palestinian characters in various settings, from harvesting olives to playing music and painting graffiti. This is a small-scale work for Gazaleh, who mainly works as a muralist, giving viewers a chance to engage intimately with his subjects.
The exhibition also includes a large photograph of a mural in the Mission District, painted by Break the Silence, which depicts a scene of festivities on the shore of a body of water — the river or the sea, interchangeably — with the words “our roots are still alive / Palestinian people will be free / everyone has a right to a homeland / todos temenos derecho a una patria libre” written on a banner unfurling across the lower left corner. The mural was painted in 1990, shortly after Break the Silence was formed by four Jewish-American women who visited Palestine during the First Intifada.
“Older people would cry and say, ‘Bring our case back to your people,’” said Susan Greene, one of Break the Silence’s founding members, who was also involved in bringing Made in Palestine to SOMArts. “That was something I took very seriously. In their living memory, before the state of Israel, Jews, Muslims and Christians had lived together there.”
When the Second Intifada began in 2001, defacing of the mural became so regular that Break the Silence chose to cover it with plywood, awaiting a day when it might be safely unveiled. Today, it remains entombed, only visible through documentation like the piece on view at SOMArts.
Diana Musa’s video “Sanarjiou (we will return)” (2019), filmed in Palestine, includes footage of children and teenagers skateboarding, an olive harvest, and other shots of everyday Palestinian life, from the moving to the brutal. One girl’s story of being caged by Israeli soldiers plays over footage of chicken cages and barbed wire fences. The video ends with a scene of a young Palestinian woman walking in a field of flowers, a reminder that beauty persists in spite of oppression.
Asma Ghanem’s triptych of quiet, domestic scenes rendered in acrylic and pastel strike a similar chord. Canvases depicting tables laden with watermelon and tea flank a central work of a girl on a tricycle titled “Palestinian Childhood” (2024). Beneath the paintings, Ghanem has installed an array of children’s toys, houseplants, and cinder blocks. Most arresting here are the girl’s eyes, holding the viewer’s gaze in an expression of innocent humanity.
Other pieces tap into the directly political side of resistance, from pushback against Israeli propaganda to recent student protests across the United States. An interactive installation by Tarik Kazaleh invites visitors to stamp Israeli propaganda leaflets with the word “bullshit” and throw them in a trash can. Another installation, by SPIE ONE, features a tent covered in pro-Palestinian signage, commemorating the recent student protest movement and many encampments on college campuses.
San Francisco State University was one of the first to divest as a result of the student movement. In 2006, the school scrapped a design proposal for a mural of Edward Said on campus that depicted a Palestinian holding a key to their home, likening the imagery to a Klansman’s hood. Even with some universities divesting, censorship on college campuses — and beyond — continues.
“The issue is not just free expression,” Greene told Hyperallergic. “The issue is humanity. Taking a stand on morality is what’s required. It’s very tragic and disturbing and obscene that people can’t take that stand.”
Gazaleh echoed this sentiment, calling on artists and viewers alike to consider their position.
“In times like this, it’s important for artists to really question their own principles, what they stand for and what they’re about,” Gazaleh said. “I’m hoping when this genocide is over — if that’s even possible — they’ll remember if they were silent or outspoken. And when it becomes cool again to care about other people of color who are suffering injustices, they’ve got to remember if they were silent about Palestine.”