Artist Statement

Kefta seasoned with Goya, Umm Kulthum playing in the background as my mom speaks Spanish on the phone, colorful tatreez pillows on white couches, calling my uncles “amo” and my aunts “titi,” my grandma on her prayer mat while my grandmi shouts “ay Dios mio!” I couldn’t necessarily identify which components belonged to which culture.

Growing up in a Puerto Rican-Palestinian household in Ohio placed me at the intersection of three cultures, leading to an ongoing struggle to feel that I belonged to any one of these identities. Through my work, I hold onto cultural elements to prevent assimilating into the predominantly White, American culture by which I am surrounded. By combining cultural artifacts, motifs, architecture, and language, I attempt to better understand how each of my cultures has affected the person that I am today. The process of researching, imitating, and incorporating relevant objects and patterns helps me connect to my Puerto Rican and Palestinian cultures to which I have desperately sought to belong.

My work is a celebration of my cultures and a reflection on the bits of them that have been embedded into me. Whether we embrace it or push it away, cultural ancestry and history infiltrate who we are in unexpected ways. Like many other multi-cultural people, I exist within a new culture. Through my work, I visually represent this new culture while trying to understand what I can claim as mine, and what happens when such different cultures intersect.