Mary Hazboun

“The Art of Weeping” collection emerged slowly, as I was grappling with multiple traumas due to living under the Israeli military occupation for twenty-one years, and later forced to migrate to the U.S. in 2004. While a graduate student in Women’s and Gender Studies at DePaul University, I started doodling in class to ease the flashbacks I was experiencing when reading course materials that discussed military and gender violence. Doodling was a way for me to avoid having to leave the classroom due to being triggered. Months later, doodles turned into sketches, and as a result, a collection of over forty complete art pieces came to life.

My drawings highlight the complex and multilayered traumas of women of color and their resistance against the intersecting systems of oppression manifested in the military machine, the patriarchal society, and displacement. My artwork is an act of decolonizing these bodies, including my own; as well as a creative form of struggle against oppression through transgressing boundaries, making the trauma visible, and linking it with collective and ancestral traumas.

artist’s website

© Mary Hazboun