On October 9, 2023 – just two days into the current Gaza genocide – Maisara Baroud heard a neighbor yelling for everyone on their block to evacuate ahead of an upcoming attack after receiving a warning call from the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF).

Thankfully, he heeded the advice and left. Soon after, an Israeli airstrike hit Baroud’s home. Already, both his buildings and five others on the block were severely damaged. “My building was no longer livable – it was a skeleton of a house left,” Baroud told CNN. “The doors were destroyed, the building’s exterior walls were all gone, the windows shattered.”

Afterwards, he and other residents initially attempted to go back inside the building to get any belongings left. However, only minutes later, that same neighbor got another call that a bombing was coming.

Baroud and all of the families quickly evacuated again. A second airstrike hit the block and completely demolished his building, his home, and his art studio.

In the daily struggle of survival in Gaza since then, Baroud has been displaced with his family over 10 times from one area to another, in search of safety.

Through trying to just survive every day in Gaza amidst attacks and destruction of everyday life, Baroud began a drawing series called “I’m Still Alive” to communicate his survival to his friends, loved ones, and now larger audience.

In the drawings, he creates abstract geometric forms. Initially this started with just a pencil and paper, before he was later on able to get some hard-to-find black ink pens.

The pieces capture the ongoing struggle across Gaza of being repeatedly bombed, displaced, sleeping in tents, lack of food and aid, loss, endurance, and more.

“Palestinian art has the responsibility to spread our stories and expose the occupation’s attempts to obliterate their existence,” Baroud says. “Art is better able to express the Palestinian essence than political figures or official narratives.”

In a May 2024 article for The Guardian, Baroud wrote how he had been doing daily drawings for years that he would share on social media. He wanted to make sure to keep that routine, despite his displacement and no longer having a home or studio or set of tools.

“Like other people, I spend most of my day (during the genocide) meeting daily household needs, in the shadow of soaring inflation and scarce goods. But this isn’t all, you have to go in search of survival and safety (which is lacking) for you and your family, and wait for the start of a new day after the end of a long night in Gaza filled with aircraft, rockets and death.”

He writes about the evolution of his drawings:

“My lines got sharper and more rigorous with every scene I drew, the black areas consuming the surface of the white paper. The tragedy, in all its detail, was reflected on this paper. The drawings were in the place of a scream and were a call out from the middle of the war demanding a stop to the killing … and that the world notice what is happening in Gaza and its confined universe.

Daily scenes and events pass by us, such as killings, demolitions, uprooting, destruction, starvation, deportation, fear, worry and sadness; these are the scenes that I express without the need to call on my imagination. The scenes we are living moment to moment became the reality that occupies the white space on my paper.”

Artists are also just humans with regular lives. Baroud’s has been turned upside down.

“The reality that I lived prior to October 7 has changed. I no longer have a safe house that shelters me and my small family. The rockets have fallen on my drawing studio (my little world) and destroyed it, and the planes have wiped out all the future plans I had for my children…

The university at which I work as a lecturer has disappeared and lies in ashes. The war machine has distorted the features of my small city and the occupation has destroyed all the beautiful things in it; so the things that are fixed in my memory now lie distorted under the rubble…

The war has swallowed whole my small dreams, and everything that surrounds us now is covered in blackness. The small heart is no longer able to bear it. For me, sadness is a decision postponed until after the war; I decided to carry on drawing despite the difficulty of the circumstances and kept for myself some time at night after a long day. Drawing has become the special way to help me overcome death for a bit. Drawing, for me, is the way to break the blockade and in this way cancel and challenge the borders and the barriers placed by the occupation.”

At the Zawyeh Gallery in Ramallah, an exhibition was installed for “I’m Still Alive” to run from April - July 2024.

The art was not just displayed as prints, but rather transferred onto the Gallery’s walls by local artists.

Palestinian cartoonist Mohammad Sabaaneh is a longtime friend of Baroud’s. They had gotten to know each other after working at the Arab American University in Ramallah before Baroud had moved back to his family home in Gaza. However, due to Israeli blockade and restrictions between Gaza and the West Bank, the two have not been able to see each other in-person for 20 years since then.

Nonetheless, Sabaaneh and Baroud collaborated remotely to select the works and techniques for transferring the paintings onto the walls of the exhibit. Sabaaneh then recruited a team of artists to help install it.

The gallery states: “The exhibition serves as a tribute to Baroud and Palestinians in Gaza, recognizing their harrowing experiences amid the ongoing war.”

At the end, the art was wiped from the walls, “highlighting the project’s impermanence and the transient nature of the war, hoping for an end to the occupation nightmare one day, as ‘no condition is permanent.’”

In addition to the Ramallah exhibit, Baroud’s work has been honored in other ways.

On February 10, 2024, an hundreds of Palestinian protestors shut down the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City. There was a sit-in in the atrium, along with several banner drops.

One of the banners called out that “MoMA Trustees Fund Genocide, Apartheid, and Settler Colonialism” – which was supplemented by 1,000 custom-printed imitation MoMA pamphlets with more information about the trustees financial and corporate investments into Israeli military weaponry and surveillance technology.

That same night, Baroud’s images were projected onto the facade of MoMA by The Illuminator, an NYC-based political projection collective who joined the action. All organizers emphasized the demands for MoMA to show Palestinian artists and voices.

This Spring, a different type of push for the “I’m Still Alive” series happened at the 2024 Venice Bienalle.

The Palestinian Museum US had organized an exhibition – Foreigners in Their Homeland: Occupation, Apartheid, Genocide – of which Baroud’s work was included among nearly 30 other artists. This included a new work from painter Samia Halaby.

However, the Bienalle rejected the show. Yet the Palestine Museum US decided to showcase it nearby, despite a lack of official inclusion and recognition.

Pieces from Baroud’s “I’m Still Alive” series, in particular, were displayed on transparent sheets of paper that were visible from the street to all visitors of the Bienalle.

Following in a long tradition of art used in the fight for liberation, Baroud draws parallels across time:

“There has been a cultural and arts movement since October 7th that feels like a revolution. It carries energy that is reminiscent of the Palestinian freedom movement in the second half of the 20th century.”

Baroud’s determination to keep creating has been a way he has decided to continue to fight for liberation and to further resist the Zionist entity.

“My message in these shows and exhibitions, whether it’s in Zawyeh Gallery, Venice or these protests, is that Gaza, despite its wounds, is still able to give. Maybe the war machine has deformed the face of the city, but it can’t kill the idea. From the midst of death I can use my voice to challenge the siege, barriers, and borders.”

In December 2024, one of Baroud’s illustrations was also used on the opening cover page of a newly released 300-page report by Amnesty International, an international human rights organization, detailing their research into the genocide over the nine months from October 2023 - July 2024.

The report explores the mass violations of international law, intent laid out, the targeting of civilians, deadly patterns, and more.