On November 29, 1947, Palestinian-Lebanese Maroun Tomb’s art exhibit opened in Haifa, a Palestinian city at the time. The exhibit featured 53 oil paintings lining the walls of a Maronite church.
That same day, the United Nations adopted the Partition Plan of Palestine, which led to a series of events known as the Nakba, Arabic for “catastrophe,” in which 750,000 Palestinians were displaced from their homes.
Among those displaced were Maroun Tomb and his family, who fled to Lebanon. The fate of the 53 paintings were lost in the ensuing years of chaos amid the Nakba and the 1948 Arab-Israeli war.
Today, curators Rula Khoury, Haidi Motola, and Joëlle Tomb, Maroun’s granddaughter, are paying homage to the lost artworks in their traveling exhibition, “The Lost Paintings, A Prelude to Return.”
The exhibition, which features 53 artists from Palestine and the diaspora, is on view at the Brookline Arts Center and Unbound Visual Arts in Brighton through Dec. 17. A public reception and exhibition opening will take place Oct. 25 at Brookline Arts Center.
Curator and artist Joëlle Tomb hopes to “recreate, reimagine, reclaim this exhibition that was lost in history,” she said. Each of the 53 artists chose a title from Maroun’s 1947 exhibit as inspiration for their piece.
The exhibit features “various different mediums, sculptures, installations, video, art, which gives freedom to the artist to express in whatever medium,” said lead curator Khoury. Textiles, prints, paintings, sculptures and mixed media works fill the gallery.
Motola and Tomb found each other through a connection between their grandfathers, who were artists and friends in Haifa.
Motola’s grandfather Jacques Motola was born in Egypt but moved to Haifa in 1935, she said. He often discussed a group of artists that would meet in his home and paint together, telling stories of “art, friends and culture and memories of youth,” Motola said.
After her grandfather’s death, Motola’s “heart stopped” while looking through his storage boxes, she said. Among his belongings were a pencil and ink drawing by Maroun Tomb, the invitation to Tomb’s 1947 exhibit, and a letter — correspondence between her grandfather and Maroun Tomb.
“I realized that I have something very precious and I have something very rare,” she said.
After connecting online, and developing plans for the exhibit, the two curators finally met in person on a beach in Cyprus. Motola gave Tomb the letter, something she thought was too valuable to share online.
“Meeting Haidi was, like, super serendipitous,” Tomb said. “It almost felt like, oh my god, I have this mission now. I need to go through with this.”
Tomb said working on this project has helped evolve her personal identity and journey. Much of her “understanding around Palestinian culture … was something that was erased from my upbringing,” she said.
Tomb hopes “The Lost Paintings” will “provide a platform for people to approach and understand the conflict and the history from the perspective of people, from artists.”
“When you hear the stories of people, that cannot be changed,” Tomb said. “This is their story. Their story of being expelled. Their story of losing their home. Their story of having the inability to return.”
When bringing the exhibit to the United States, the team faced many roadblocks navigating a complicated political climate, Tomb said.
“It being a Palestinian project as well, we were not necessarily received with arms open right away,” she said. Politics “made it challenging to get larger institutions to embrace us.”
It was important for them to find partners who understood the project, and wanted to work with them, Tomb said. This led the curators to work with the Boston Palestine Film Festival, Brookline Arts Center and Unbound Visual Arts.
Motola faced emotional roadblocks throughout the process as well, and found it challenging to continue with the exhibit amid the Israeli-Hamas war in Gaza, she said.
“The moment when the genocide started, it felt like pointless, in a way, to talk about something that is already like reaching the most extreme point of it,” she said. Feedback from artists who said it might be “more important than ever to keep talking about this,” helped Motola move forward, she said.
Themes found in Palestinian art like landscape, richness of land, cactus, and olive trees permeate the exhibit, Khoury explained. Most of the artists “connect to the land of Palestine,” she said.
Among those artists is Dina Nazmi Khorchid, a Palestinian artist who works primarily with printed and woven textiles.
Khorchid was inspired by the title “Under the Oak Tree,” as she often connects with themes of nature in her work. Her abstract piece uses woven textiles in greens, yellows, and browns.
Khorchid is interested in the stability of trees and the juxtaposition of their adapting and migrating reflection in water, she said. “I think that’s very much the experience of being someone who doesn’t have access to their homeland,” she said.
Khorchid was among the artists who personally connected with the themes of nature, displacement, and resilience found in “The Lost Paintings.”
“We had a lot of artists that were connected with the story that their grandparents had to leave Haifa and had to leave villages and cities in Palestine,” Khoury said. “They were left with their stories. And in their artworks, they express the memories of their grandparents.”
After its time in Brookline and Brighton, “The Lost Paintings” will continue to Belfast, Ireland; London and Bristol, England; with more cities to come.
This story is part of a partnership between Brookline.News and the Boston University Department of Journalism
This article was originally published on October 24, 2025.