Celebrated Artist Makes A City Eternal

“I don’t like to speak,” artist Mohamad Hafez said to a packed audience at the Peabody Museum on Friday night. Since he became a public artist, he said, ​“I wanted my art to speak on my behalf,” and ​“I love it when institutions take the artwork, and they talk.” 

In a conversation with Agnete Wisti Lassen, associate curator of the Yale Babylonian Collection, however, Hafez did indeed speak — movingly and eloquently — about Eternal Cities, his installation to accompany the Peabody’s exhibit of Babylonian artifacts, and about how his art practice has grown and developed in the past decade as he seeks to build bridges and create empathy.

For Hafez, Eternal Cities is a ​“collaboration between my studio and the museum,” that offers a few possible answers to the questions of how museums can engage with artists, how artists can engage with museums, and how to reach groups of people that might not ordinarily come to museums. 

It’s the latest step in a public artistic practice that began when war broke out in his native Syria in 2011. It’s also, as Hafez sees it, a natural extension of the values he was raised with since he was a child.

Family Values

“I had a wonderful upbringing,” Hafez said. He was born in Damascus in 1984 and grew up in Saudi Arabia. His father was a doctor among a group of international doctors working there. ​“We were the only Syrian family,” he said, among 250 other medical families, with friends hailing from the United Kingdom and Sudan. As a child, he built forts and made elaborate constructions out of Legos. Being surrounded by ​“so many ethnicities and nationalities,” he said, ​“enriched me in ways I did not realize.” When he returned to Damascus as a teenager, he understood his parents as being at the epicenter of ​“my big fat Syrian wedding,” in a house jammed with food and relatives.

“Growing up as a teenager, trying to find my roots, was very fulfilling,” he said. To start answering the question of ​“what does it mean to be Syrian,” he ​“was just walking, looking at churches, next to synagogues, next to mosques, next to nude sculptures.” The Damascus he encountered was an overwhelmingly diverse place. Later, going to college in the U.S. Midwest, he understood the image the media portrayed of the Middle East as ​“one radical movement,” but ​“that’s not what I saw.”

He came to the United States in 2003 and trained as an architect, following somewhat the expectations of his family, who expected him and others in the family his age to become engineers, doctors, or lawyers. A 12-year stint designing skyscrapers at the New Haven-based firm Pickard Chilton followed, while he made art in private. ​“I had to keep a straight face as an architect” while ​“my homeland was blown out of existence,” he said.

He ​“flipped the page” from architecture to art when he traveled to Europe for a skyscraper project, and visited his brother-in-law who had been a successful architect in Syria; he had since become a refugee in a camp in Sweden. The encounter created a ​“premature midlife crisis” in him, Hafez said; he was 27 years old.

“What are you doing about it?” Hafez asked himself. ​“Why have I been saved?” He focused on refugees in part because of the ​“verbal diarrhea” from authorities ​“painting refugees with one brushstroke.”

“How can I humanize them?” he thought.

Speaking Through Art And Coffee

Hafez’s first art show was in 2012 at the New Haven Armory, followed by City-Wide Open Studios in 2015. In 2016 his career started to take off, with seven shows (group and solo) that year and 12 the next year. He has since exhibited pieces across the country and internationally. Hafez attributed his early success to the fact that he had actually been making art all his life. By the time he wanted to exhibit his work, he had enough to mount five solo shows at once.

He made a series of pieces built out of suitcases, some of which fell under the name Unpacked. ​“I’ve always been interested in baggage — physical baggage, emotional baggage,” he said. As word about his pieces got around, people began to drop by his studio to give him suitcases that had been in their families, suitcases used by the refugees of the past. At shows, present-day refugees approached him to talk about their own baggage, the things they brought with them when they could bring almost nothing.

“Art gives us a way to humanize refugees,” he said.

In 2020, he opened Pistachio, a coffee shop and restaurant in Westville, and soon after, a second larger location on Howe Street downtown, following the same impulse to create understanding. His shops are places where ​“people can discover the Middle East without knowing it,” revel in the joys of food, coffee, and atmosphere. ​“We love beauty. We love design. We love everything that’s beautiful,” he said. ​“There’s beauty all around us. We just have to look and focus.” And ​“I love feeding people. This is my mom’s teaching of me.”

In response to a question from the audience, he told the story of acquiring the antique radios that adorn Pistachio’s walls from a man in Nantucket whose collection he had seen online. Intrigued, he drove there and visited. He learned the man had to sell his collection because he was downsizing, and could no longer house his collection, the work of many years. Hafez bought three or four radios. He drove most of the way back to New Haven when he realized he’d made a terrible mistake. He went to a bank, withdrew a lot of cash, and drove back to Nantucket, telling the man when he arrived that ​“I’m going to clean you out today.”

That was several years ago. When he opened Pistachio, he decided to line the walls with the radios, and paper the bathrooms with their manuals. One day an old gentleman walked into the shop with his two sons. He looked at the wall. ​“I think those are my radios.”

With the passage of time, they hadn’t recognized one another at first, but quickly made the connection. ​“We hugged it out,” Hafez said, and the old man was touched. ​“He saw his life’s work on display,” he said. ​“He passed away a week later.”

Hafez added one more thought to that. ​“I love to be the servant that makes the tools to tell people’s stories,” he said.

Building Bridges

Nearly a decade into his public life as an artist, Hafez is as dedicated to it as ever, as a creative person and as a representative of his culture. ​“We are not a pessimistic people,” Hafez said. ​“You have to rebuild and move on.” And making art is a ​“gift to the next coming generation,” helping people to not forget the history of the place they come from, even as war has radically transformed parts of it. Part of that isn’t just about instilling history, but ​“love of history.”

Lassen remarked that, while Hafez’s sculptures never shy away from depicting the destruction war has wrought, they also always contain elements of whimsy. ​“That’s on purpose,” Hafez said. He noted that while the destruction in Syria has been heartbreaking, it has also not been complete; in juxtaposing whole and ruined buildings in Eternal Cities, he shows ​“how this used to be” and how parts of it ​“still look.” He also wants to call attention to smaller destructions that we accept outside of war — caused by decay or neglect. Before the war began, Hafez recalled with a laugh the way people spray-painted ads for restaurants on 2,000-year-old walls without a second thought. The historically vital and the quotidian everyday existed side by side. The ​“layers and layers of paint on the walls” are ​“layers of history.”

Some of that mindset was baked into Hafez’s approach to making Eternal Cities, which took inspiration from the pieces he found in the Peabody’s collection of artifacts from the Middle East. Hafez connected with them based purely on their shape and size; those he thought he could use, he made 3D prints of and incorporated into his sculpture. Though the piece abounds in found objects, most of it was built by Hafez, by hand. ​“Part of me is always going to be an architect,” he said. But in picking out the objects to scan and print, he felt ​“like a child in a candy shop.”

Lassen noted, with a laugh, how Hafez had reused some of the shapes. In a roughly 2,500-year-old incantation bowl from southern Iraq, he saw a satellite dish. A woman hanging laundry in the sculpture is a pillar figurine from Syria about 4,000 years old. The figure of a woman in a column base is taken from another 4,000-year-old piece from southern Iraq.

Hafez was quick to see the humor in it, too. ​“Open the drawer to the left of the piece,” he instructed audience members. ​“You might have a laugh or two.”

But the duplication and repurposing works in two directions. First, accompanying text near the sculpture alerts the viewer as to what’s going on; looking at the sculpture can lead to discovering the actual artifacts nearby and learning about their history. But the meaning flows in the other direction too: presented like this, the repurposing doesn’t destroy the original meaning; it recontextualizes it for the present, makes it more immediately relevant. In a sense, it adds to the artifacts’ long story, and shows the value in both preserving and using them.

“Art is such a powerful tool. I don’t understand how people don’t get this,” Hafez said. In his art, he said, he’s about ​“building bridges of coexistence, of love, of peace. That’s what I was raised on.”

Since the Peabody has opened, he has visited Eternal Cities and lingered nearby to see how people react to it. ​“I’m lucky to have a medium that people can understand,” he said. He has noted, with humility and satisfaction, the way people — especially younger people — are drawn into the piece, and then to the artifacts themselves. He sees the energy in their faces. ​“I cannot think of a more fulfilling engagement,” he said. ​“It’s so worth it.” And he remains humbled by the capacity of art to create empathy and respect, ​“without a single word.”