Join The Neighborhood for P is for Pomegranate, G is for Grenade, and L is for Love, an exhibition by multimedia artist Shasha Dothan (2025 Peleh Resident) examining how our understandings of nationhood, violence, and belonging take shape in childhood; and at the same time, exploring the family as an intimate space where these terms are negotiated.

Gallery Hours:

Wed - Sun 12pm - 6pm

Opening Reception:

February 14, 6pm-8pm

In P is for Pomegranate, G is for Grenade, and L is for Love, Dothan continues to turn inward, examining her role as a mother in response to the ways in which geopolitical structures render violence legible, acceptable, and even revered in childhood, alongside the corresponding challenges of parenthood.

Across video, sculpture, and drawing, she examines how our understandings of nationhood, violence, and belonging take shape in childhood, often before they can be fully understood or questioned. Hanging soft sculptures made using stuffed and painted fabric variously shaped into clouds, weapons, and airplanes, pictographic drawings from a children’s dictionary, and a video featuring Dothan’s young daughter playing with toy soldiers reference how objects and images of violence are normalized in childhood. The exhibition also contains, however, the implicit—and insistent—possibility of resistance. Ultimately, Dothan’s work resists moral equivalence or easy reconciliation, instead insisting on a clear-eyed examination of how forms of violence become entangled with identity, belonging, and perception from an early age.

This exhibition, curated by Jesse Bandler Firestone is part of the Peleh Family Residency, a program of The Neighborhood: An Urban Center for Jewish Life supported by The Peleh Fund. The Peleh Family Residency is based in Berkeley, CA and Brooklyn, NY, and seeks to help artists of all disciplines strengthen their practice by offering them time, space, and support. Designed to accommodate artists with families, the residency provides a space for retreat, reflection, and art-making, and an opportunity to foster new collaborations, audiences, and connections. The Peleh Family Residency was founded in honor of Ruth Silverman whose spirit guides this endeavor.