Glass has always been a material of contradictions: ancient yet overlooked, functional yet decorative, fragile yet enduring. In his first solo exhibition, “To Tie a Knot,” Lebanese-American artist Naz Khoury uses these contradictions to excavate questions of heritage, environmental extraction, and cultural erasure. Displayed at Philadelphia’s Da Vinci Art Alliance, the show weaves together fiber installations, light works, and archival imagery, with glass sculptures serving as the exhibition’s most haunting vessels of memory.
Preserving Memory in a Breakable Medium
Several of Khoury’s glass works suspended old family photographs within transparent forms, each image held by threads as if floating in time. These pieces — part of the 2024 series “To Hold A Memory Close” — anchored the gallery with intimate and deeply personal histories. Khoury’s relationship to memory is inseparable from childhood visits to Jbeil, Lebanon, where the sensory experience of place imprinted itself on him.
For Khoury, glassmaking itself reflects the complexity of memory. “The process is captivating and exhilarating,” he said. “You know that there is a large chance you may end up with nothing. Something might break. But the act of making is so special.” The high risk of loss — embedded in the medium itself — mirrors the precariousness of inherited memory, diaspora, and the erosion of personal and collective histories.
Material History as Narrative
While Khoury’s art is rich with nostalgia, geography, and diasporic storytelling, he increasingly centers the material history of glass. Glass originated in the Levant, yet its legacy is often credited to Europe — Rome, France, Finland, and later the American studio glass movement. The misattribution is no accident; it reflects colonial habits of cultural erasure.
At the same time, the material itself raises ethical questions. Glass derives from silica — a non-renewable resource extracted through environmentally damaging mining practices in Appalachia, New Jersey, and across the United States. This reality positions glass within global patterns of exploitation that have long affected both the Arab world and working-class American regions.
The exhibition invited visitors to confront these layered complications: environmental destruction, historical erasure, and the colonial rebranding of Levantine craft as Western innovation.
Curating Against Erasure
Curator Sarah Trad, a Lebanese-American artist and founder of Batikh Batikh, recognized the depth of these themes early in her conversations with Khoury. Growing up in the U.S. public school system, Trad saw how histories of the SWANA (South West Asia and North Africa) region were flattened or distorted. Her curatorial mission is to “set the record straight.”
“To Tie a Knot” was part of Trad’s fellowship at Da Vinci Art Alliance, designed for curators working with queer artists. Her vision included pairing Khoury’s work with a tatreez (traditional Palestinian embroidery) demonstration by Palestinian artist Samar Dahleh — a gesture toward shared cultural stewardship. By placing different forms of SWANA craft in dialogue, Trad foregrounded art as a method of preserving history, resisting erasure, and reclaiming lineage.
Diasporic Connection Through Material
Early planning meetings for the show took place in Philadelphia cafés, where Khoury arrived with pieces of glass in hand. Strangers often approached, curious about the works — an early sign of the sculptures’ magnetic quality. But Khoury and Trad resisted explaining too much. They wanted the audience to enter the exhibition through mood, intuition, and emotion rather than a prescribed narrative.
Khoury’s understanding of nostalgia deepened over time. “Our brains push positive memories to the forefront,” he said. “Working with my hands helps me process this bittersweetness, this desire for something that no longer exists — or maybe never existed at all.” Glass became both method and metaphor: a way to crystallize the intangible, to hold together fragments of a past that is always slipping away.
Craft as Archive, Object as Witness
Khoury has recently become fascinated with the idea of art as archival practice — one not dependent on Western institutions. He reflects on queer artists in New York during the AIDS crisis, who documented their lives through photography and writing before their deaths. That urgency, that instinct to create a personal record, resonates deeply with him.
The conversations sparked by “To Tie a Knot” affirmed the power of this approach. Arab visitors — Lebanese, Palestinian, and others — shared reflections on identity through what Khoury calls “the material condition of where we’re from.” Craft becomes witness. Objects hold what people forget. Glass — fragile yet enduring — carries memory across borders and generations.
Glass as a Lifeline
Khoury discovered glassmaking only in August 2023, during a period of severe emotional distress. Learning to work with fire, heat, and molten material forced him to confront fear and rebuild himself physically and emotionally. “It encompassed my whole body,” he said. “It forced me to unlearn fear. That’s what made me fall in love with it.”
In this way, every piece in the exhibition is not only an artistic expression but an act of survival. Fragility, in Khoury’s hands, is not weakness — it is a profound form of endurance. The delicate becomes resilient. The breakable becomes a vessel for memory, lineage, and healing.