In her series, “Made in USA, صنع في أمريكا,” Eid utilizes upcycled materials from thrift stores, found objects, and heirloom jewelry to reenvision scenes from the Middle East’s Levant region. Creating bold and vibrant self-portraits in a red white and blue color palette, Eid explores her Muslim Arab identity while challenging the gaze of 19th and early 20th century European orientalist photographers, whose works are referenced and researched by Eid.

Shown alongside Eid’s works are a number of historical photographs from the Levant region on loan from the Estate of Dr. Mohammed B. Alwan, an Iraqi-born scholar and one of the world’s foremost experts on Iraqi and Arabic poetry. A Professor Emeritus at Tufts University, Dr. Alwan was instrumental in the establishment of the Arabic program at Tufts. We thank the estate and our longtime colleagues at Ars Libri Ltd. for providing us with access to these important works.

ARTIST STATEMENT

My discomfort with this title is a reflection of what I’ve felt living here most of my life, but particularly the years when I was a teenager. In 2001, 9/11 happened and I was a 15 year old freshman in high school. I was confidently unconfident in so many ways, and every day I stepped out of the house with fabric flowing from my head. It was the year I experienced harm and violence towards my body. After school one day, a classmate approached me and said he would protect his country and had a knife. What happened after I can barely remember, I think the only “protecting” my mind could comprehend was shutting itself off. If this was his country, then what country was I from? That question would be reinforced many times throughout my life as I tried to be at home in a place where I never felt at home.

After the Muslim ban in 2017, I felt that traumatic experience re-enter my body. The first image from this series was created that year titled Artificial Sweetener and featured a fabric rose shoved in my mouth. The rose, a symbol of heritage and heirlooms, is also the official flower of the US. I was exhausted, feeling constantly defined by mass-produced stereotypes. One day I was under my kitchen table picking something up off the floor and I hit my head coming back up, noticing the sticker under the table that read “Made in USA.” I started to think about what being a product of this nation means - both myself and my classmate expressing self through the things we had consumed. How could pride be born out of soils that have witnessed massacres? How many ways has American "pride" been used as a weapon of violence? A knife - a tool like many tools, that could be used to cut crops in order to nourish my body, or a tool that could take my life.

Growing up I felt the constant tension of cultures colliding, between the world my parents fled from, a place that was also a product of colonialism and imperialism, and the world I created in my bedroom. The sound of the Fugees cassette, The Score, constantly rewinding and playing in the background, "Ooh, la-la-la, It's the way that we rock when we're doin' our thing, Ooh, la-la-la, It's the natural la that the Refugees bring, Ooh, la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la, Sweet thing." I loved to play dress up and experiment with my older sister's drugstore makeup that was in a plastic grocery bag. I would sneak into my mother's drawers looking for scarves to "borrow" and see the swirling embroidery of my mom’s abayas and my dad’s traditional collared robes. My parents had a style that could not be emulated, never forced or assimilated, just them. Textile landscapes started to form in my mind. Mixed with the patterns of summers spent in Lebanon, of my grandmother's couch cushions she sewed by hand. She was a seamstress and almost everything in her home was made with her special touch.

When I learned photography my senior year of college, I finally found a space to express all the parts of my identity, and something beautiful started to bloom. I felt a portal opening up between the past, the present, and the future I wanted to create. My ancestors were calling to me, a divine force was moving through my hands, creation and Creator as one.

The sharing of this work is also an invitation for all of us to reflect on our place within the violent structures of this country. What will we continue to grow and make here? How will we use the tools we have been given to heal, transform, and stitch a new tapestry for collective liberation?

FEDA EID
(Lebanese-American, b. 1987)

Feda Eid is a Lebanese diaspora visual artist and photographer living in the occupied lands of Wampanoag and Massachusett People - so called Quincy, MA. Her work explores the expression of heritage, culture, identity and often tense but beautiful space between, what is said, what is felt, and and what is lost in translation. Using the everyday, passed down and reimagined as openings to ancestral wisdom and the Sacred. She captures these emotions through her bold use of color, textiles, adornment and pop culture linking the past and present. Feda is guided by her family's journey as Lebanese immigrants who fled the country's civil war in 1982 and her childhood growing up as an Arab and Muslim in the U.S.

Eid studied Sociology at Regis College and photography at New England School of Photography. Her work has been exhibited at the Peabody Essex Museum, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Lesley University, and The Shed NY among others. She was 2019 Luminary and Visiting Studio Artist at The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 2022 Massachusetts fellowship Artist in Residence at Mass MoCA Studios, 2022 Collective Futures Fund grantee, 2024 Foundation For Contemporary Arts grantee and awarded WBUR's 2024 The Makers, Boston's 10 artists of color whose work you should know.