With “The Lost Paintings,” Palestinian Memory is Made Material Across Two Boston Spaces

On November 29, 1947, Palestinian-Lebanese artist Maroun Tomb opened an exhibition of fifty-three paintings in Haifa, Palestine. The very same day, the United Nations approved the partition of Palestine, which ignited a civil war, the withdrawal of British forces, and the eventual mass displacement of Palestinians by Zionist nationalists. The Nakba, Arabic for “catastrophe,” forced Tomb and more than 250,000 Palestinians from their homes and land between 1947 and 1948 alone. The fifty-three works he exhibited were lost. 

Seventy-four years after Tomb’s original exhibition, curator Haidi Motola discovered a letter from Maroun to her grandfather Jacques. Within, Maroun grieves his home and work: “Now you can imagine how unlucky my Exhibition was.” He enclosed a watercolor sketch in the letter and a program for the show, which lists the titles of the fifty-three lost works. Motola reached out to fellow curators Joëlle Tomb (Maroun’s granddaughter) and Rula Khoury to reimagine Maroun’s show by inviting fifty-three Palestinian artists to take a title from that 1947 exhibition as inspiration for a new work. The resulting show, “The Lost Paintings: A Prelude to Return,” steadies itself with the memory of Tomb’s work, using contemporary voices to discuss the violent history that has transpired in the seventy-eight years between, envision better futures, and assert an authentic Palestinian visuality. 

The show is split between Unbound Visual Arts (UVA) and the Brookline Arts Center (BAC), both of which introduce the show with an emphasis on landscape. At UVA, it opens with The Garden (2024) by Fouad Tomb, Maroun’s son. Fouad’s cacti prickle up from the land in streaks and blobs of gentle color—green and yellow cactus pads dolloped with bright red cactus flowers. The Palestinian identity is formed around the land and what grows from it, these natural forms bearing witness to the violent history that has transpired since 1947 and serving as symbols of resistance. Tomb’s cacti are as bright as they are sharp. At the BAC, Noel Maghathe’s Through the Olive Trees (Younis) (2024) untethers this landscape, using sheer fabric staged over a window to derealize the Palestinian land, with a cold Boston hovering behind it. Existence for Palestinians is fractured—an image of home only available through translucent fabric—another city, skyline, and history forever imposed on top of their land. 

Maghathe’s superimposed landscapes stand witness, from a distance, to the violence and ongoing genocide perpetuated against the Palestinian people. In his letter to Jacques, Maroun writes: “Keep away from Palestine as long as you can. It is unsafe anywhere here. Death is in every corner.” And so “The Lost Paintings” must atone with death. Works like Iman Jabrah’s Under the Oak Tree (2025) relate the landscape to this cruelty, moving soil from a site of growth to one of burial. A black chain hangs from the gallery’s ceiling, interlaced with honey locust thorns spiking out at eye level. The chain coils on the floor, punctuated by a shining red hook enclosed in a ring of soil, a disrupted, anonymous burial mound. Jabrah’s sculpture is violent, the gravity of the chain reading as tension—the tension of something ripped from the ground and left dangling. Despite the shadow cast by brutality and disruption throughout the exhibition, it’s rooted in hope and resilience, as cultural forms and practices blossom between the cracks of displacement and settler colonialism present throughout.

Much of the show employs traditional Palestinian textiles, like Nardeen Srouji’s Landmark (2025–), a vertically placed sheet of metal interlaced with colorful yarn. Embroidered patterns symbolizing the Wadi Salib neighborhood of Haifa interrupt these cold steel barriers, blooming up through the sharp steel, disrupting displacement through its sheer gesture of existence. Or take Farid Abu Shakra’s  Embroidered Landscape (2018–2022), a series of four copper prints that are pierced with more perforations than threads. The threads weave and unweave through the paper, leaving a memory of their pattern inseparable, even in their absence, from coastlines of Palestine. 

Prior to its presentation in Boston, the traveling exhibition was on view at two Montréal locations—Articule and Montréal, arts intercultural—but finding a space for the exhibition in Boston was not easy. Joëlle Tomb cited having challenges finding space and financing for such a show in Boston. At Brookline Arts Center, organizers took to social media prior to the exhibition opening on October 25 to alert their audiences that the organization’s board of directors had pushed back against the exhibition. With an outpouring of community support, the opening reception received more than 500 RSVPs, underscoring the scale of local engagement.

Thankfully, the show is here, and presents a Palestinian visual identity with such clarity that it cannot be ignored. In a time when the welfare of the Palestinian state is at stake, and dispatches from Gaza struggle against censorship, the image of Palestine is warped by shaky newsfeed content and watermelon emojis. Just as settler colonialism forces Palestinians from their land, censorship and iconoclasm force them from expressions of their culture. But “The Lost Paintings” presents Palestinian culture, materials, and process in their own voice, asserting an unmistakable, immutable Palestinian visuality.

There is Raed Issa’s series Diary of Displacement (2025), made of hibiscus, coffee, and tea on paper, the only materials available after repeated displacement left the rest of Issa’s work lost beneath rubble. And Maria Saleh Mahameed’s Sabra Clay Pot (2025) depicts a tumbling ceramic pot spilling its contents from a bush of sabra, or prickly pear cactus. Done on a polypropylene bulk bag sewn into canvas, Mahameed composed the work on the floor, her body smashed into the surface, leaving a streak, a smudge, a handprint. And while the empty pot speaks of loss, the marks of her body reveal the artist at work, moving above the piece, embodied, alive, and still creating. To the left of Mahameed’s work is Zohdy Qadry’s startling The Tent (2024), a compact oil-on-canvas painting. Qadry strips away landscape, leaving a spattering of black triangles over an anxious, yellow-washed canvas. Even with just the scratchy, wavering geometry of the tents, the piece hums with life. It’s a life that is disassembled and repitched somewhere new—a nervous, transient state of perpetual fleeing. 

While these works do the important task of revealing the depth of violence and displacement inflicted upon Palestinians, they also preserve and expand the Palestinian identity, using the canvas to transcend colonial histories. “The Lost Paintings” reaffirms to me that the revolution will not be televised. It will be stitched together by hand or smudged on a canvas; it will grow from the fragmented remains of what once was.  

Just as Palestinian existence is inseparable from the long precedent of colonial violence, their anxieties are inseparable from the hope of creation. This is apparent in Bayan Kiwan’s masterful The Cake Makers (2025), a domestic scene of a woman baking at home, her head pitched up at headlines scrolling across the television as she absentmindedly taste tests. There is still the baking of dough, the merging of color, and the figures which persist in their acts of creation. To witness the show is to remember a bit of Palestine as it presents itself to us. As Maroun Tomb ended his letter to Jacques, speaking of the enclosed watercolor sketch: “Don’t take it as a piece of art,” he explained, “it is only intended to let you remember Palestine from time to time.” “The Lost Paintings” extends that invitation, presenting Palestinian resilience across generations and borders. The memory of a land, a culture, and its people illuminate with persistence: a prelude to return.   

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“The Lost Paintings: A Prelude to Return” is on view through December 17, 2025, at the Brookline Arts Center (86 Monmouth Street, Brookline, MA) and Unbound Visual Arts (175 Washington Street, Brighton, MA).