The Luck or Misfortune of Geography

Curatorial Statement

The Luck or Misfortune of Geography presents sculptural works born of a Lebanese-American mother’s reflection on raising children in the United States while the Middle East, the region her family comes from, remains marked by conflict. Hannah Shaban’s work moves between grief and gratitude, holding space for a loving, complicated, and evolving relationship with her culture and homeland.

Through the meditative manipulation of clay, Shaban meticulously sculpts her own family alongside imagined and remembered figures from Lebanon and Palestine. Tenderness and loss sit side by side. Some works speak to childhood and innocence, while others consider inherited memory, identity, and the quiet weight of distance. Together, these figures form an intimate visual language through which Shaban explores her experience of family, motherhood, and the Arab American diaspora.

Shaban’s figures are portrayed with remarkable detail, every face carrying individual expressions, small gestures, and postures that feel carefully rendered. The detail in her works is emphasized through her intentional choice to cold finish rather than glaze; each choice a deliberate act of restraint or revelation, echoing the exhibition’s larger meditation on what is held close and what is allowed to be seen.

The duality between meaning and materiality, between her hand as an artist and the figures she portrays, creates the dissonance from which the exhibition emerges. These works were born of a mother’s deeply personal awareness of geography and circumstance, and of the vastly different realities in which children can grow up. Shaban’s sculptures do not attempt to resolve this tension. Instead, they hold it, with immense tenderness, born of gratitude and sorrow.