Duluth-based artist channels home through reclaimed woodwork   

Wearing blue jeans and a simple black tee, Hamza Arman sinks into seat cushions ripped from an old Chevrolet Astro and looks around his Duluth garage-turned-studio. Hamza’s recent work—intricate maps of his beloved Palestine cut from reclaimed wood—hang on a wall above stacks of live-edge slabs.

The 40-year-old artist, who was born in the small Palestinian town of Ein Yabrud in the West Bank and has been living in Gwinnett County for about a decade, comes from a family of makers. His father is a jeweler and his mother, an accomplished baker. She is “the Michael Jordan of the kitchen,” he jokes.

Woodwork has consumed Hamza’s life for years, but the nature of his work has changed in the last eight months. In addition to reviving his early digital and film photography from Palestine, he now almost exclusively carves maps of his homeland as a way to channel his grief and anger over Israel’s assault on Gaza—and he’s increasingly finding a market for his work.

Hamza is the second oldest of seven kids. He was born in Palestine, but his family’s roots in the United States date back to the 1920s. Hamza himself was born on a visit home. Just a few weeks after his birth, the family moved back to the States and would go on to spend the next two decades between Chicago and metro Atlanta. 

As a boy, Hamza often traveled back and forth from Palestine to the U.S. He remembers his grandfather building small chairs from scraps of recycled wood, rope, and any unwanted materials he could accumulate.

“To this day, best chairs I’ve ever seen,” Hamza says.

He followed in his grandfather’s footsteps, in some ways, working with his hands, while taking up well-paying gigs in construction and in the courier business. It wasn’t until last fall, weeks before the October 7 attacks, that Hamza felt compelled to make something new, with Palestine in mind.

“I’ve always loved the map,” he says, looking at the collection of arrow-shaped woodcuts before him. “It’s a thing with all of us Palestinians, really.”

Whether it’s a polished keychain of a map or a framed illustration complete with Arabic names of each historic city that have since been replaced by Hebrew names, you won’t find a Palestinian home without the map, he says. 

“We may not be there, but Palestine is always with us.”

His first few wooden creations, designed with the help of a local engraver, didn’t sell particularly well at the first market. Then again, he laughs, he did share the booth with his mother, whose cakes stole the show.

At the Alif Institute’s Arab Festival in early October, Hamza sold one wooden map and a few old photos he’d taken during his time in Jerusalem. 

The same man who bought Hamza’s first map returned to buy five more. And over the last few months, as Israel has continued its relentless and deadly bombardment in Gaza, more and more people, particularly among the Palestinian diaspora, he said, have sought out his art at in-person markets or through his budding Etsy shop.

The work is tedious, he admits. Just finding workable wood—well-dried wood—can take ages. Then you have to find a planer big enough to smooth the slab, and only then can you really begin the cutting, the sanding, the carving. It can take weeks before a product is ready to be sealed and sold. 

But Hamza is just grateful to have something to do with his hands, and to have somewhere meaningful to channel his grief. His cousins and brother-in-law, he says, in the West Bank are locked up over Facebook posts sympathizing with their own people.

It’s no surprise that his work has since become more “political,” Hamza adds. The map itself, and its borders, have been changing since 1917.

One piece, which he recently sold at an Eid Market in Columbus, Ohio, still sticks with him. Using a repurposed wooden door, he had carved a Palestine-shaped hole in the middle and painted the wood white. Working from the back of the opening, he then wove in what looked like barbed wire spray-painted red.

“It speaks to people, the barbed wire,” Hamza says. “When they see it, they get angry. It pisses them off. It should.”

So far this year, Hamza has traveled to Columbus, Cleveland, Washington, D.C. and Tampa to sell his work at local art markets and Arab festivals. He’ll be taking his work to Jacksonville soon and expanding his work in Atlanta, too. He’s also donated photo prints and woodwork to collectives fundraising for Palestine in New York and Cincinnati. 

One day, Hamza says he’d also love to see his work in a Palestinian Museum like the one in Washington, D.C., for the world to bear witness. But he’s worried that this moment of support for Palestinians might be fleeting—and he’s not sure it will last long enough for any of that to come to fruition.

“I want people to remember we are not a trend or a hashtag,” he says. “This is a total erasure, an annihilation of my people. Please don’t forget that.” 

Find more of Hamza’s work on his Instagram – here.