Press release:
Tatreez Workshops: Learn Palestinian Embroidery
Monthly, 1st Thursdays, 6 pm - 8 pm: FREE
November - May (starting November 5)
Philadelphia Folklore Project
735 S. 50th Street, Philadelphia, PA 19143
Join us at PFP on first Thursdays - November 5, December 3, January 7, February 4, March 4, April 1, and May 6 - to learn some of the basic patterns of tatreez, Palestinian women's cross-stitch needlework. Making and sharing traditional needlework, stitching patterns belonging to villages that no longer exist, local Palestinian women artfully sustain heritage and community through the beauty of tatreez. Local artists Maisaloon Dias and Alia Sheikh-Yousef will share embroidery patterns, the stories of women who make these beautiful works, and the current situations of Palestinian people and the Palestinian struggle for justice.
The workshops began as a result of our 2009 exhibition on tatreez, Palestinian needlework, an important and vital folk art for centuries. The exhibition was curated by Nehad Khader who hoped to publicly share some of the experiences, skills and arts of the Palestinian community in a post-911 era of heightened anti-Middle Eastern sentiment.
The exhibition, which closed in January 2010, but continues online, features the embroidery traditions of local Palestinian women who came to Philadelphia after the Nakba, in 1948, and again after 1967. The needlework patterns that women use for domestic decorations and clothing were originally from their home villages, but since the occupation and refugee camp experience, these traditions have mingled and mixed. The embroidery remains a trace of home villages, even as those homes are destroyed, inaccessible or gone. Making homes in Philadelphia and building a community here, women still exchange needlework. Embroidered work is part of a wedding trousseau and makes a Palestinian home look Palestinian. The monthly workshops allow you to make your own connections to traditional patterns, to the histories in which these arts are embedded, and to other people.
PFP's Community Folklife Documentation Project is supported by The Pew Center for Arts and Heritage, through the Heritage Philadelphia Program, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and with the assistance of the Leeway Foundation.
PNC Arts Alive supports the Home Place project.
The Philadelphia Folklore Project is a 22-year-old public interest folklife organization committed to sustaining the alternative and progressive folk and traditional arts of our communities. For more information visit our website: www.folkloreproject.org or call 215.726.1106.
Photo credits: Alia Shiekh-Yousef with some of her needlework; Details of work; Maisaloon Dias, Wafai Dias, Nehad Khader, and Alia Shiekh-Yousef with work; Details of work. Photos: Sarah Green.
