Resistance: The Refusal to Disappear brings together a group of ceramic artists dedicated to Palestinian liberation and solidarity. We all arrived here from different backgrounds and artistic practices, making work that ranges from illustrative functional ceramics and soda fired pottery to narrative sculpture and fragmented forms. Yet we meet here, through our shared commitment to resistance and liberation. This exhibition does not consider resistance a singular act, but rather, an ongoing practice sustained through community, care, creativity, and labor. Together, the work in this exhibition affirms that every life contains an entire world, every demolished home holds generations of memory, and that Palestinians, their histories, and their futures will not be erased.

"Sumud (صمود) is the Arabic word Palestinians use for a particular kind of endurance–not protest, not defiance, but the quiet refusal to disappear" (Hirbawi, 2026). More than perseverance or resilience, sumud is the act of remaining, of continuing to exist, remember, and imagine despite ongoing attempts at erasure. Like sumud, resistance is not always loud. It can be found equally in telling family stories, preserving cultural traditions, learning and teaching history, cultivating land, making art, and in direct acts of protest. In all its forms, resistance is a refusal to be silenced and a refusal to disappear.

Palestinian voices, and those speaking in solidarity with them, are often censored by our government, cultural institutions, and even within our own art communities. As artists, our practices create space for memory, mourning, anger, celebration, and collective imagination of a liberated future. Through clay, we honor the lives, histories, and futures that resist erasure. Like sumud, clay endures. Once fired and transformed into ceramic, it never goes away.

This exhibition invites the viewer to join us in fighting for a world where the people of Palestine can hear the birds chirping rather than the dropping of bombs, taste the sweet juice of a Jaffa orange rather than the dust of rubble in the air, and thrive on their ancestral land rather than surviving amidst the destruction of their homes.

By gathering these artists in one space, the exhibition creates opportunities for dialogue, collective mourning, celebration, organizing, and hope. It asks viewers to consider how art can preserve memory, challenge systems of oppression, and build solidarity. In doing so, Resistance: The Refusal to Disappear becomes both an exhibition and an act of sumud: a shared commitment to Palestinian visibility, resisting erasure in our daily lives and through our artistic practices, and imagining, and working toward, a future where Palestine is free, because when Palestine is free we are all free.