Shattered by blast, landmark Beirut museum tries to rebuild

Lebanon's only modern art museum, the Sursock, is still rebuilding a year after the Beirut port explosion decimated it

BEIRUT -- The artist meticulously cuts small pieces of yellow and red glass, then lays them in a pattern to recreate the stained-glass windows that were the trademark of Beirut’s Sursock Museum, shattered in last year’s port explosion. Conservators, hunched over with magnifying glasses, fill lines of paint loss caused by the explosion with their brushes and weave together tears thread by thread under microscope. Other workers delicately piece back together broken shards of ceramics. “It has been very hard to see my work of 30 years on the ground, back to being sand ... But it is important to rebuild the museum,” said Maya Hussaini, the artist who worked on the stained-glass windows during a major renovation at the museum that finished in 2015 and is back rebuilding them now, “I had to go back to my archive to dig out my designs to bring it back to how it was,” she said.