The Art Miles Mural Project
The first mural
About ICAE and Art Miles
The Iraqi Children's Art Exchange has joined an exciting project sponsored by the UNESCO Decade for the Culture of Peace and Non-Violence Among Children of the World: The Art Miles Mural Project. Iraqi artist Thamir Dawood and I are coordinating Art Miles Iraq for ICAE; he is working in the Middle East, from Amman where he lives, and I am working here in the States.
We will develop mural projects with communities of Iraqis living both inside and outside of Iraq. Some of these murals will be exchange projects, in keeping with the kinds of work ICAE has been doing over the last eight years.
The first mural was completed in March, 2008. We hope to have representation from Iraqis in Syria and Lebanon as well as from those living in Europe and the United States. We have our work cut out for us.
A gallery collaboration
Working at Dar Al Anda
A beautiful children's atelier - a work space - for this project is being generously donated , free of charge by Majdoline Al-Ghezawi Al-Ghoul and the Dar Al Anda Gallery in Amman. This space has enabled us to carry out our first project successfully, providing a good and reliable place to meet and work with children and a safe place to store our materials and the mural as children work on it over the course of many weeks. It promises to be the site of many future ICAE projects.
In addition, there is a small guest room at the gallery that has been made available to ICAE when we are working in Amman. We are very grateful to Majdoline and the Dar Al Anda for their ongoing help and support . Our continued success working on cross-cultural projects with children depends on these partnerships in Amman.
[Pictures...]
[Thamir Dawood's web site]
[Interview with Thamir Dawood for MassMOCA Mural project]
Building a Culture of Peace in Iraq
The Iraqi Children's Art Exchange is beginning a new collaboration with a small civil society organization in southern Iraq whose focus, like ours, is on children, human rights, education, and culture.
Trading toy guns for soccer balls.
One project in Samawa is helping develop and support a culture of peace where children and youth in the community can focus their energies, time and imagination on sports, art and other positive activities. The project grew out of concern about children's play: using toy guns they re-enact the war and violence they have seen around them.
The organization set out to provide and support positive activities to replace these games, inviting children and young people to turn in their toy guns, in exchange for soccer balls. The first exchange was modest, giving away thirty balls. They were overwhelmed by the response to the second exchange. More than 150 children and teenagers showed up.
ICAE hopes to initiate an Art Miles Mural Project working with local artists to provide another way to channel the energy and imagination of children and youth in Samawa.
Supporting Education
In addition to supporting the balls-for-toy gun initiative, ICAE is helping repair and furnish a school in Diwaniya that serves about 160 children. The school is in need of basic repairs such as fixing the water pipes so bathrooms can be installed, and needs basic furniture -- tables, desks and chairs. ICAE recognizes the importance of schools, not only for educating children, but for supporting parents and families as well.
And schools can support community by providing an after-school-hours meeting place for individuals and organization, giving them an opportunity to talk about community issues. We hope our support helps get children back into school and strengthens the fabric of this community.
No other method of printing multiple copies of black-and white photographs compares in subtlety and richness with photogravure. A continuous-tone process so painstakingly exact and complex as to be arcane, it produces prints unequaled in luminosity and dimensional definition. To Jon Goodman - contemporary photogravure's unquestioned master - what its creators were searching for, "the light-drawn image in ink on paper," is "a mystery of the highest order." - Andrew Wilkes, Aperture [Read entire article]
Photogravure is a photomechanical means of making a photographic image in ink on paper from an etched copper plate. Using this process, Jon Goodman has created a plate of my mother and child photograph taken at Al-Mansour Pediatric Hospital in Baghdad, 2004. We have designed a broadside which will be the poster and centerpiece for a new exhibit: "One day we triumph, another we are beaten. One day we are badly beaten, another we rejoice." We expect the exhibit to be ready by the end of 2008.
The calligraphy has been created especially for this poster by Nihad Dukhan.
The International Cultural Arts Network
Painting by Thamir Dawood
|
The International Cultural Arts Network (ICAN) emerged from the March, 2006 Global Peace Initiative of Women Iraq-US Summit: Creating A Common Future in New York. The Summit brought Iraqi and American women together for a weekend of meetings to foster understanding, develop working relationships and collaborative projects.
Claudia Lefko and the ICAE joined with three other participants at this summit to form an arts network whose stated goal was to investigate the possibility of mounting an exhibit or series of exhibits integrating the work of Iraqi and American artists and an artist exchange program. Specifically, we hope to bring young and mid-career Iraqi artists to the USA as part of a cultural arts exchange.
The work of four Iraqi artists has been selected for the first exhibit: Thamir Dawood, Fadhel Al Dabbagh and Serwan Baran and Lamia Al-Talabani. The ICAN project is being overseen by Rosemary Lane, Executive Director, Luminare, The Wellness and Expressive Arts Center in Bear, Delaware.
Thamir Dawood |
One Soldier's Experience:
Continuing To Make Meaning
A Community Service and Education Project Developing and
Taking Place In Evansville, Wisconsin, Small Town America
Tammy Splittstoesser, a member of the Wisconsin National Guard, recently returned from a 16-month deployment; 4 months were spent state-side in preparation and 12 were spent abroad. Her experiences, both from a military standpoint and as a curious citizen of the world, have left a lasting impression on her. Afghanistan will remain a permanent point of interest in her quest for intellectual understanding. While there she put her digital camera to regular use, amassing well over five hundred of her own photographs, as well as incorporating pictures from the collections of her comrades in arms. Upon her return, she endeavored to open Inside Out Expressions, an art studio and gallery concept meant to be an open forum for the arts within the community she lives. The primary goal being to simply make art at all levels more accessible to the general public. And not just a finished product, the end result - but educational services, studio space, affordable supplies, and workshops as well.
What has all this got to do with the Iraqi Children's Art Exchange and website? Great, I am glad you asked! Tammy has teamed up with Claudia Lefko to create a six-week curriculum/project that involves looking at, and appreciating art from a social commentary point of view rather than the typical and sometimes over-simplified aesthetic mode of considering art. The curriculum is set up to define social in a broad sense, it includes religious, economical, political, educational, environmental, and intellectual elements and is designed to get the middle and high school students who will be participating in the six week session to engage in open-ended conversations about these topics as they relate to both the part of the world they personally get to experience, and parts of the world that are distant to them, and in some situations, rarely experienced or understood by outsiders.
The curriculum is divided into several parts; the first will encourage participants to talk about art in an all-encompassing manner (elements of art - color, line, form, mediums, as expressionistic, universal to humanity...). Then we will move onto well-known artists, using posters for examples of their works and talk about particular art movements that are relevant to the pieces and artists we will be discussing. The main focus during this stage will center on social aspects that set those artists apart, what made them path-pavers for their time, or what hindered them from being famous while they were still alive, what was going on politically, religiously, where did the arts stand in the eyes of the public at the time they were producing their pieces? What was their subject matter? Why is subject matter important? How were they commenting on the world around them? What was the publics' reaction to their comments? This stage will then lead to an introduction of some middle-eastern art history and background and be accompanied by recent photography and a number of artifacts brought back from Tammy's experiences and travels in Afghanistan. As a culminating event, students will be invited into the Inside Out Expressions studio and gallery space to view an exhibit negotiated between Tammy and Claudia specifically for this purpose. Students will engage in a guided discussion about the art, using the foundations of social evaluations of art and their exposure to Afghani culture through Tammy's experiences. Participants will then be invited back a second time, provided studio space and materials so that they may choose one piece within the exhibit that speaks to them on an individual level and create their own responsive piece of art. The finished collection of work created by American students, of small town America will then be forwarded back to Claudia, and via her amazing efforts, back to Iraqi children.
Through these combined efforts, a soldier, a civilian, teachers, and children, we hope to promote art as a voice for children, as a means for trying to interact with the world around us, as a vehicle for dialogue, and as an attempt to make sense of our experiences.
