Loading ...Historic Palestinian, Native American, Irish Links Explored In Arab Museum Exhibition
Although many people worldwide have suffered long and brutal intrusions, Palestinians, Native Americans and the Irish have intersected for centuries in specific and often unusual ways. Artists with roots in these places explore the profound connections and commonalities in their experiences of invasion, occupation, and colonization; not as novelty or polemic, but as both history and current events.
The Arab American National Museum (AANM) offers an opportunity to explore the myriad intersections between the three cultures via the touring exhibition The Map is Not the Territory: Parallel Paths – Palestinians, Native Americans, Irish, on display through May 15, 2016, in the Museum’s Lower Level Gallery. The exhibition is free with Museum admission; several public programs are planned (see details below).
Thirty-nine contemporary artists, most of them Palestinian, Native American and Irish, have created more than 60 original paintings, photographs, prints, drawings, artist books and films considering their historical and contemporary links. Eight brief wall texts provide the threads to each culture’s struggles for human and civil rights. The various art forms confront history, investigate personal and political dialogue, and reflect the multiple truths in Polish American philosopher/scientist Alfred Korzybski‘s dictum that “the map is not the territory.”
Conceived by Jennifer Heath of Baksun Books and Arts in Boulder, Colo., and co-curated by Dagmar Painter of Jerusalem Fund Gallery Al Quds in Washington, D.C. (see bios below), the exhibition began touring in 2013 and will remain on the road until 2018. It premiered at The Jerusalem Fund Gallery Al Quds, and has traveled to Levantine Cultural Center in Los Angeles, the Multicultural Arts Center in East Cambridge, Mass. and P21 Gallery in London.
“The map is not the territory” was coined by Korzybski, who proposed that humans have access to desires and sets of beliefs, which are confused with direct knowledge of reality. He believed the territory of existing inhabitants isn’t necessarily synonymous with the maps and boundaries drawn by pioneers.