In 1975, a young Helen Zughaib, her mother and two siblings said goodbye to Zughaib’s father. Her father remained in the country while Helen and the rest of her family fled the Lebanon Civil War.
The family rushed through the streets of Beirut, seeking safety at the Corniche, a seaside promenade. Her family’s apartment would soon be caught in the war’s crossfire. Zughaib and her family flew to Greece before air traffic shut down. Before they departed, her father told them they’d return to their home in a week. Zughaib wouldn’t return to Lebanon for 35 years.
“He was standing by my window as we were saying goodbye to him,” Zughaib said of having to evacuate from Lebanon without her father. “I said, ‘When are we going to come home?’ He said we would be home in a week.” She reunited with her father a few months later.
The evacuation was formative for the then-16-year-old. Zughaib now channels her experiences through her artwork.
Her latest art exhibition, “Stories My Father Told Me,” is on display in the ArtRage Gallery in Syracuse. The series features 24 gouache paintings inspired by intergenerational storytelling. Each painting is displayed next to a story written by her father, Elia Zughaib, based on his childhood in Syria and Lebanon in the 1930s and 1940s.
She uses themes of hope and peace in her work. Zughaib, like her parents, graduated from Syracuse University. Journalist Jennifer Heath named Zughaib, “one of the most renowned Arab-American artists in the United States.” Zughaib has had an impressive 30-year career in the arts, with displays in the Collection of the White House and the American Embassy in Baghdad.
“We grew up around the dinner table with daddy telling stories, to teach about our family, the community and where we came from,” she said.
Zughaib’s artwork is heavily influenced by her cultural identity as a Lebanese Arab-American. Much of her work is focused on women and children facing migration and displacement due to conflict.
To Zughaib’s family, oral storytelling is sacred. Each time her family was forced to relocate, Zughaib said they carried “memories and the times we had, as opposed to luggage.”
Initially, her father Elias refused to write down his stories because of the significance of the tradition of oral storytelling in his culture.“He was completely resistant to this whole project,” Zughaib said. “But he ultimately wrote them down for me.”
Her father Elias wrote down his stories over a 12-year span. Zughaib captured her father’s narrative on canvas as he wrote. She finished “Stories My Fathers Told Me” in 2016.
The first painting of the series “Telling Me His Stories” showcases Elias and Helen with the family’s pet cat sharing stories in their living room in Beirut, surrounded by floral and striped patterns. The final painting “Coming to America” depicts her father migrating to the United States in 1946. The painting features passengers on the MS Volcania, approaching the symbolic Statue of Liberty in expressive blue and green hues.
Zughaib’s paintings are tied together with the broad color palette she used, which remains constant throughout her paintings.
She recalled her childhood as “full of movement.” Zughaib was born in Beirut, Lebanon but moved to Greece, France, Kuwait and Iraq. Her family fled Lebanon twice, during the 1967 Israeli Six-Day War and the 1975 Lebanese Civil War. The family also fled from several coups in Baghdad.
She attended high school at the American School of Paris before moving to the United States to pursue higher education. Zughaib earned a bachelor of fine arts degree from Syracuse University in 1981. When she moved to New York to enroll in college at17 years old, she said she had to catch up to her peers. She was younger than most of her classmates and found it difficult to relate to them because of her background.
“Where I grew up, I was quite sheltered,” she explained. “As a female, I wasn’t permitted to do a lot, because of the environment and the culture. There were a lot of restrictions on my movements.”
Zughaib’s time at Syracuse University was an important step in her artistic career, she said. She discovered her specialty, gouache paint, at The College of Visual and Performing Arts. The opaque paint is thick and “unforgiving,” causing many artists to stray away from the medium, she said. “Not a lot of artists use it. It’s not easy to hide or fix mistakes. But I love using it, the colors are gorgeous.”
In 2021, Cune Press published the book rendition, “Stories My Father Told Me: Memories of a Childhood in Syria and Lebanon,” featuring both the literary and visual work. The same year, Helen and Elias Zughaib were awarded the Evelyn Shakir Non-Fiction Award from the Arab American National Museum Book Awards.
Helen Zughaib’s “Stories My Father Told Me” will remain on display in ArtRage Gallery located at 505 Hawley Avenue until Saturday, Oct. 28. The gallery is open to the public Wednesday through Friday, 2 p.m. to 6 p.m., and Saturday, 12 p.m. to 4 p.m. More of Zughaib’s work can be found on her website, www.hzughaib.com.
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