The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Museum celebrates Palestinian art, culture
New facility slated to open in April
WOODBRIDGE — The gray walls of Faisal Saleh’s Palestine Museum US are starting to be filled with paintings and photographs representing his people’s contributions to art and culture.
While the grand opening of the museum at 1764 Litchfield Turnpike won’t take place until April 22, the museum is open by appointment.
“Really there is some sort of a media vacuum for Palestinians in the world in general and the United States in particular,” said Saleh. “The vacuum is at the artistic and cultural level.”
Saleh, who immigrated to the United States in 1969, said the museum is a place “where we can show that the Palestinians are human just like everybody else. They have artists and poets just like everybody else. We are kind of staying clear of a lot of political discussions and political discourse.”
The exhibits are still arriving and being mounted, but there is already a variety of artistic styles on display. Most are by Palestinian artists from around the world, such as Manal Deeb, of Fairfax, Va., whose work includes Arabic calligraphy.
“It’s using the calligraphy as a decorative artistic mix,” Saleh said.
Other works include bright, feminine images by Suzan Bushnaq, of Kuwait, and Mohamed Khalil’s colorful acrylics. Large portraits by Khalil are planned for the lecture room, which will also include a video monitor.
An exception to the Palestinian artists is Margaret Olin, a professor at Yale Divinity School who also teaches religious studies and Judaic studies at Yale. Her photographs of the Dheisheh refugee camp, near Bethlehem on the Israeli-occupied West Bank, show the everyday life of Palestinians.
“It gives the viewer an idea of what it’s like walking around the streets of a refugee camp,” Saleh said. Many of the photos feature children.
The photos also depict “a very high concentration of murals” on the sides of buildings, Olin said.
In looking for a place to photograph Palestinian life, “I settled on Dheisheh as one of those projects pretty early because I was fascinated by the way it looked … and this really lively atmosphere,” she said.
“Basically, it’s a very poor area” of about 13,000 residents, she said. “It’s run by the U.N. The Palestinian Authority really doesn’t have anything to do with it. It’s regularly raided by the Israeli army, usually in the middle of the night.
“For me the walls of Dheisheh are kind of like a conversation in images,” Olin said. “They’re almost a memorial. Many, many of them are of young people who were killed in the camp on these raids or they were out demonstrating somewhere else and they were killed.”
The first artwork that greets a visitor was painted by Ayed Arafah of Ramallah, who grew up in Dheisheh. It is a mural of Rachel Corrie, 23, of Olympia, Washington, a member of the International Solidarity Movement, who was killed in 2003 by an Israeli Defense Forces bulldozer in the Gaza Strip town of Rafah as she tried to stop a Palestinian home from being razed. It is the most provocative piece in the museum.
“It isn’t treated politically in the sense that this is a human tragedy here,” Saleh said. “The Palestinians like to honor her memory and she is well respected in the Palestinian territories.
“It’s only fitting that the mural would feature something in recognition of her,” he said. “Her parents are planning on attending the opening ceremony and viewing the mural for the first time.”
In addition to painting and photographs, Saleh plans an exhibit of Palestinian embroidery, as well as historical documents, such as his father’s British passport, issued before 1948.
“For the opening ceremony, we’re going to have three musical performances by three artists, featuring violin and oud, a Middle Eastern instrument. Other performances are possible, such as poetry readings and dancing.
Saleh, who lives in Wallingford, was born in the West Bank city of el-Bireh, a “twin city of Ramallah,” in 1951. He was his parents’ 11th surviving child, living in a one-room house.
“My family was a refugee family that originally was from a village called Salamah,” a suburb of Jaffa, Israel, he said. “They became refugees in the aftermath of the 1948 war, what the Palestinians refer to as the Nekba. That means catastrophe.
“At the time, 700,000 Palestinians became homeless and that 700,000 is now 7 million. My father had orange groves and banana groves,” Saleh said. “They lost everything. They walked out with the shirt on their back.”
But the family managed. Saleh’s brother knew former President George W. Bush at Yale University. Saleh attended George School, a Quaker boarding school in Pennsylvania before going to Oberlin College and the University of Connecticut School of Business. He works in the employee benefits business, consulting with employers, and co-owns a startup, Plasmotica, which develops devices that can perform diagnostics without sending samples to a lab.
Gabriel Da Silva, who owns the Da Silva Gallery in the Westville section of New Haven and is mounting the artwork, said of the museum, “It was something missing. There’s not many art galleries representing particularly Palestinians . ... I think it’s important and to the credit of Faisal . ... Because they all live in many different places around the world ... there are many different emphases.”
Judy Alperin, CEO of the Jewish Federation of Greater New Haven, which is also located in Woodbridge, said of the museum, “There’s a lot for their culture to be proud of and they should display it.”
Alperin rented space in Saleh’s building — across the hall from the museum — while the Jewish Community Center was being renovated after a fire. She said she hoped there would be opportunities for “bridge-building and dialogue together” once the museum opens.
Alperin has not seen the museum and didn’t want to comment on the Corrie mural. She said of Saleh, “He’s a great guy. He’s very gentle and [was] helpful to us in our time of need and I really appreciated it.”
After its opening ceremony, the museum will be open Sunday afternoons, by appointment and for visits by groups and schools, Saleh said.
“This is just a nucleus of what we may expect in the future,” he said.
While he is providing the financing for now, he hopes to attract investors and move the museum to a bigger city, such as New York, San Francisco or Washington.
For information, go to www.palestinemuseum.us or email info@palestinemuseum.us.