TEACHING RESIDENCY WITH JUDE ABU ZAINEH
She Bends Neon Studios, San Francisco, CA
February 2021
Teaching Residency
Student Artist: Jude Abu Zaineh
Teaching Artist: Meryl Pataky
Jude Abu Zaineh is a Palestinian-Canadian interdisciplinary artist and cultural worker whose practice spans art, food, and technology to examine culture, displacement, diaspora, and belonging. Grounded in her upbringing in the Middle East, her work explores ideas of home, community, and resistance through material and symbolic form.
During her residency at She Bends Neon Studios, Abu Zaineh proposed working with the watermelon as a central motif—an image tied both to personal heritage and to Palestinian resistance. Over the course of the residency, she fabricated 25 neon watermelons, using repetition as a way to build technical fluency while embedding political and cultural meaning into the material language of neon.
The works produced during this residency were later exhibited with She Bends at the Institute of Contemporary Art San Francisco in Tend to Grow (2022) and at the Museum of Glass in Tacoma in Redefining Neon Legacy (2023), extending the residency’s impact into national museum contexts.
“Being the inaugural She Bends resident artist was a key milestone, as it represented my return to home—to the first place that allowed me the freedom and opportunity to learn the magic of glass bending and the science of neon under Meryl Pataky’s wing. I’m excited to help pave the way with the She Bends residency for other underrepresented artists to gain meaningful time and space to contribute culturally significant work to the craft of neon.”
About the Artwork
The watermelon is an agricultural staple and beloved summer fruit in Palestine, and has also become a long-standing symbol of Palestinian resistance and perseverance. After public displays of the Palestinian flag and its colors were banned by Israeli forces, the watermelon—mirroring the flag’s colors—emerged as an emblem of national pride and freedom of expression. Through neon, Abu Zaineh reclaims this symbol, transforming it into a luminous marker of identity, memory, and endurance.
Artist Bio (Selected Highlights)
Abu Zaineh is the recipient of the 2020 William and Meredith Saunderson Prizes for Emerging Artists and was among the first artists selected for a collaborative residency with the Ontario Science Centre and MOCA Toronto. Her work has been presented internationally, including at MAAT (Lisbon), Cultivamos Cultura (Portugal), Centro de Cultura Digital (Mexico City), and Forest City Gallery (Canada), with forthcoming exhibitions in Paris and Canada. She holds an MFA from the University of Windsor and is currently pursuing a PhD in Electronic Arts at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute as an SSHRC Doctoral Fellow.
