From traditional oil and acrylic paintings to rugs and paper-mache clothing, USC’s Middle Eastern North African Student Assembly (MENASA) held its first art exhibition in celebration of Arab American Heritage Month. Titled “Echoes of Generations,” the artwork highlights key points of MENA identity.
Standing in front of her featured paintings, artist and MENASA co-executive director Katia Atiyah paid homage her Lebanese and Palestinian background through scenic depictions of Lebanon.
“I thoroughly believe in the power of art to convey heritage and have deep cultural meaning,” Atiyah said. “I think back to when certain emotions felt too heavy, and I would always turn to painting.
“For me, painting is therapy, and I am so grateful to be able to use art as a tool to express my heritage, identity and emotions,” she continued. “Many of my pieces are inspired by my Lebanese and Palestinian heritage and depict scenes of Lebanon.”
Located in the USC Argue Plaza, adjacent to the Widney Alumni House, the exhibition featured the various multimedia works of artists Ismail Zaidy, Yara Idrees, Leyla Akgedik, Mohammad Saadeh, Katia Atiyah, Yasmine Asadi and Zeenat Javaid.
Zeina Kaibni, a sophomore studying business administration with a minor in AI and MENASA director of programming, said the organizers stayed up last night putting all the artwork in frames.
“We have a lot of different types of artwork, not all of it is necessarily Middle East themed, but it’s artists, MENA artists. We have photography, we have paintings,” Maideh Orangi, a senior studying philosophy, politics, and law and MENASA co-creative director, said. “We’ve been telling ourselves throughout the whole process that we want MENA art to take space on campus.”
Creator of one of the larger pieces, Javaid painted a series that he said explored hens and their role as the primary commodity of the poultry industry and how that was symbolic of the reproductive social labor expected of women in a patriarchal capitalist society.
“The consumer society in which we live utilizes chickens in perverse, exploitative ways, as seen through the exhaustive mass-poultry industry,” Javaid said. “The humor and absurdity of my chickens is underlined by implicit reflection on humans’ tendency to diminish the lives of other beings, despite our own likeness to them. We are the chickens. The chickens are us, the chickens are nature.”
Hosted in collaboration with USC Undergraduate Student Government, Orangi explained that this was MENASA’s first year as a recognized student organization with a full budget, and the student body chose to put on the art exhibit in hopes of attracting students who they believed typically did not see other assemblies attempting to showcase the work of MENA artists.
“Art is such a huge industry, especially in L.A., and this exhibit shows that we, too, are part of that narrative and can do that,” Orangi said.