Dough

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Dough

2018
Drawings
Charcoal on paper
39 3/8 × 27 9/16 in. (100 × 70 cm) Frame: 42 7/16 × 30 15/16 × 1 1/4 in. (107.79 × 78.58 × 3.18 cm)
Gift of Maliha Tabari from Tabari Artspace (M.2019.224)
Not currently on public view

Curator Notes

Samah Shihadi has built a body of work around Palestinian food, capturing unassuming scenes of cooking, eating, and sharing ameal....
Samah Shihadi has built a body of work around Palestinian food, capturing unassuming scenes of cooking, eating, and sharing ameal. For Shihadi, food acts as an emotional anchor to communicate experiences of lost identity and collective memory. In this drawing, which almost registers as a photograph, an elderly Palestinian woman sits on her living room floor rolling dough. Carefully bending over to pick up a lump of dough, she conveys a sense of care and thoughtfulness around the act of preparing food, an attentiveness mirrored in Shihadi’s own detailed approach to her subject. Shihadi was born in 1987 in Sha'b, a small Palestinian village, and since childhood has worked with pencil and paper to create her compelling photorealistic drawings.
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Bibliography

  • Komaroff, Linda, Stephanie Rouinfar, Sandra Williams, and Sarah Mostafa Ahmed. Women Defining Women in Contemporary Art of the Middle East and Beyond. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2023. https://archive.org/details/women-defining-women (accessed January 12, 2024).