The Timeless Thobe: Documenting Land, Heritage & Culture in Palestinian Dress

  • February 26, 2025 6:00 PM - 7:30 PM
  • Bard Graduate Center

    38 West 86th Street
    New York, New York 10024
Ticket Price $0.00-$15.00 Register Now
Description

The Timeless Thobe: Documenting Land, Heritage & Culture in Palestinian Dress 

A lecture by Wafa Ghnaim (Museum of the Palestinian People)

Wednesday, February 26, 2025

38 West 86th Street, Lecture Hall

gallery@bgc.bard.edu

$15 General | $12 Seniors | Free for people associated with a college or university, people with museum ID, people with disabilities and caregivers, and BGC members

 

The thobe, a traditional hand embroidered dress made and worn by Palestinian women for centuries, is the bedrock of Palestinian identity through heritage, culture, and land. For millennia, women in the eastern Mediterranean have showcased their skillful stitchery on their traditional dress, displaying unique motifs, colors, and styles across the various villages of old Palestine. After 1948, over 750,000 Palestinians were forced into exile, carrying their dressmaking and embroidery traditions with them into refugee camps around the world. As the diaspora spread across the globe, the largest and longest-standing population of displaced people in the world, the thobe evolved into a symbol of national and cultural identity beyond borders. Palestinian dress historian and educator Wafa Ghnaim will discuss the evolution of the thobe and the language of Palestinian embroidery as it was used on traditional dress throughout time.

 

Wafa Ghnaim is a dress historian, researcher, author, archivist, curator, educator, and embroideress who learned from her mother, award-winning artist Feryal Abbasi-Ghnaim. Ghnaim specializes in Palestinian, Syrian, Jordanian, and Lebanese dress history and identification, with a focus on traditional embroidery techniques, historic reconstruction, and oral history.

Ghnaim’s first book, Tatreez & Tea: Embroidery and Storytelling in the Palestinian Diaspora(first edition 2016; second edition 2018), documents the traditional patterns and stories passed on to her by her mother. She has released a number of publications since, including THOBNA (2023), Tatreez Companion (2024), Tatreez Beauty: A Coloring Book (2024), and has published her research with the Art Institute of Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Institute for Palestine Studies, and more

Ghnaim continues her mother’s educational legacy through the Tatreez Institute, a global arts education initiative she began in 2016 teaching Palestinian, Syrian, and Jordanian embroidery techniques and lecturing at leading institutions, museums and universities around the world. The Tatreez Institute stewards a collection of over 180 dresses and headdresses from Palestine, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon that were rematriated from households and shops across North America for the purpose of preservation, education, publication and research of intangible cultural heritage in the diaspora.

Ghnaim was the first-ever Palestinian and Syrian embroidery instructor for the Smithsonian Museum (2017–21) and earned a prestigious senior research fellowship position at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (2023–24). Ghnaim has been featured in major media outlets throughout the duration of her career, including Vogue magazine, which named her and her mother “the world’s leading guardians of tatreez.”

Ghnaim is currently serving as the curator for the Museum of the Palestinian People.

 

Image credit: Palestinian women wearing six-branch dress (thobe) styles in the diaspora. Photograph by Shelagh Weir (1989).

Date & Time

Wed, Feb 26, 2025 6:00 PM - 7:30 PM

Venue Details

Bard Graduate Center

38 West 86th Street
New York, New York 10024 Bard Graduate Center
Bard Graduate Center

Bard Graduate Center is devoted to the study of decorative arts, design history, and material culture through research, advanced degrees, exhibitions, publications, and events.


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