A Living Memorial to Palestinian Activist Alex Odeh Takes Flight
"The Stolen Dove" is a participatory project that turns a decades-old monument into an artwork to keep the scholar and civil rights leader’s memory alive.
One of the few monuments honoring an Arab-American in the United States is the subject of a new participatory art project that turns the decades-old sculpture of a slain Palestinian-American icon into an expansive, living artwork.
Outside the public library in Santa Ana stands a memorial statue to Alex Odeh, a Palestinian-American poet, civil rights leader, and scholar who was assassinated in 1985. Created by Algerian-American artist Khalil Bendib in 1994, it depicts Odeh holding a book in one hand and a dove in the other, symbolizing his work as a peace activist.
The bronze statue has been vandalized several times over the past three decades — it was splashed with red paint in 1996 and 1997, and in 2020, the dove was stolen, though it was soon recovered and reattached. Last December, the dove was removed again, but with the aim of keeping Odeh’s memory and legacy alive.
Artist Jon Rubin first encountered the statue of Odeh in the spring of 2023, during his residency at the Grand Central Art Center (GCAC) in Santa Ana. It had recently been vandalized, and remnants of a brick lay strewn on and about the sculpture. He was struck by the animosity directed at the memorial, but also by the fact that many people were not familiar with Odeh’s life and work, as a librarian informed him.
“That combination stayed with me,” Rubin told Hyperallergic. “Here was a monument that was simultaneously being attacked and overlooked: a work that remained politically charged enough to attract repeated acts of vandalism, yet had become somewhat invisible to the public around it.”
