Last night I passed by the 47th Palestinian Heritage Exhibition thats organized by the Palestinian Culture Center. If like me you hadn’t heard of the center before, here is a little brief they emailed me:
The Palestinian Culture Center aims to support needy families and preserve the rich and vibrant culture of Palestine. It does this by encouraging ladies to continue a beautiful handicraft, embroidery, which has been in Palestine for hundreds of years and ensuring that the tradition is carried on to the younger generation.
The Center has been in operation since the early 1970’s in Kuwait and then moved to Jordan after 1990. Today, the PCC, has over 450 women from the Palestinian refugee camps in Jordan working on these beautiful pieces. For these women, the payment they receive is a great support for their families. The PCC also aims at supporting education and helps various schools and education programs in Palestine as well as needy families.
As a charity organization we use a simple rule in all our pricing. Thirty-three percent of the sale cost of an item is given to the woman that produces the work, thirty-three percent goes towards covering the cost of the item, and the remaining amount is distributed to schools, orphanages and needy families mostly in Palestine.
The exhibition turned out to be pretty interesting with a lot of handicraft and embroidery available to purchase. I got a little bit of a tour by one of the organizers because I really didn’t know much about Palestinian culture. One of the interesting things I learned was that the traditional Palestinian patterns used in embroidery are actually inspired by nature. It’s basically nature turned into abstract geometric shapes. Also back in the day, embroidery was important for Palestinian women because it was a way for them to attract eligible bachelors since they would make their dresses themselves.
Other than handicraft and embroidery, the exhibition also has artwork, books, jewelry and food for sale. So if you’re interested in checking the exhibition out, it’s running till this Thursday. For more information you can check out the event page [Here] or their instagram account @palestiniancc
5 replies on “47th Palestinian Heritage Exhibition”
Very interesting. Thanks for posting about this.
Hi Mark,
I still follow your link. I’m glad that this exhibition is back. In fact we here in US buy through etsy from Jerusalem (https://www.etsy.com/shop/NHfashion) even SF and other States run same shows.
“I really didn’t know much about Palestinian culture” I’m glad that you get to know this wondering what took you long since WE do know all others cultural tradition. Hope you do eat Palestinian za’ater 🙂 :).
By the way KUWAIT never claimed around the 1990 media that Palestinian used to have 5% or 10, 15-25% deducted directly from the monthly salary to help the schools that opened afternoon for Palestinian students, we were thankful, but this should have been said loudly that we are still people with dignity.
Thank you for posting as usual, you bring the past memory in good manner.
Are they still exhibiting and may one buy on a regular basis, please?
no exhibition is over
Glenda,
If you have an interest I would contact the Women’s Cultural & Social Society, their web: https://www.kwtwcss.org/contact/
They might be able to give you some contact of that exhibit. I tried to look for the fair trade that mostly sell original Palestinian from Palestine —– I found this International exhibit in Kuwait Feb 6-10 2018, hope they participate:
https://www.itf-kw.com/
May be Mark will follow up and post about it for the locals.