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.
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.
The Webdah School and Family Center, Amman, Jordan
Noura and Marianne
Webdah School, 2007
Children Learn and Talk Through Art was officially launched in September of 2006--the result of a collaboration between Claudia Lefko of The Iraqi Children's Art Exchange and Fr. Nabil Haddad, the Executive Director of The Jordanian Interfaith Coexistence Research Center. Working with parents and other community members, they transformed formerly unoccupied and under-utilized space in Fr. Nabil's church into a safe environment for children. The school is a response to the educational crisis facing refugee families in Jordan. UN and non-governmental organizations estimate that there are now one million Iraqi refugees in Jordan; at least 500,000 refugee children and youth.
The school has been renamed The Webdah School and Family Center; a prospectus and appeal for support was published in March, 2007. Discussions are underway to broaden the program to include an on-site family center staffed by a social worker and others from the refugee community. Services and guidance on a range of issues, from translation, to housing, work and visas will be available. In addition, the school will increase staffing, provide training for its teachers and expand the hours of the school day in the coming year. We hope the school will serve as a model; program staff will be available to consult with others in Amman seeking to create community-schools for Iraqi refugee children and youth.
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The Mural Project: A Collaboration between MassMOCA, the Iraqi Children's Art Exchange and the Webdah School and Family Center
The ICAE became involved with a variety of projects at MassMOCA when some of the art and photographs from our collection was included in an exhibit that opened in October, 2006: It's Elementary was the first all-children's art show in KidSpace. Seeing the art and photographs from Iraq inspired children and art educators at the museum to respond.
Drawing on mural, MassMOCA, 2007
Shannon Toye, a teacher at Clarksburg Elementary School and an educator at the museum, began working with Director Laura Thompson and children in an after-school program. They decided they would fold 1000 Cranes to send as a wish to Iraqi refugee children living in Jordan. Following the legend, their wish for an end to war and a world of peaceful coexistence would be realized if they folded 1000 Cranes. To explain the story, they wrote a play based on the story of Sadako and the 1000 Cranes; they performed the play at the opening of the exhibit at MassMOCA.
Making a Mural at MassMOCA
In addition to the Crane Project, the staff at KidSpace invited visitors to a "free day" at the museum to draw and write messages on a giant mural that would be sent to The Webdah School and Family Center, a nonformal school for Iraqi refugee children in Jordan. The school is a project of the Iraqi Children's Art Exchange and the Jordanian Interfaith Coexistence Research Center (JICRC) in Amman.
The paper covered one entire wall of Kidspace; large trees were drawn to anchor the piece. More than 600 people visited KidSpace over the course of the day, people whose roots were in South America, China, the Middle East and Canada as well as the USA. They drew pictures, and wrote messages on the mural, creating an inspirational work of art that was presented to Fr. Nabil Haddad, the Director of the JICRC on a visit to the USA and then taken to Amman, where it was displayed along with the photographs of some of the children and families who had done the work. Iraqi children and their families in Amman, could see the wishes contained in the beautiful mural, and they could see the faces of the children and youth who had created it. In addition, in that same room of the school--our "workshop"-- the cranes were hung on strings in front of the windows and other cranes were put in large baskets on tables.
Iraqi artist Amer watches as boy works on mural, and unidentified man in suit watches, Webdah School, May 2007
Making murals in Amman, Jordan
In response to this mural, we decided to begin a mural project of our own at the Webdah School, inviting children and their parents to come on Saturday afternoons to paint, socialize and eat! In addition to our teacher Sander, we invited two Iraqi artists to come work with the children: Thamir Dawood and his friend Amer, whose last name I never knew. As the children and their families came and went from the workshop, everyone was struck by the sight of the beautiful cranes. They could sit and look at them one-by-one in the baskets; some had messages written on them. Some were the work of a beginner, a determined child folding for the first time. Others were small, and perfectly folded--tight little birds made of from beautiful paper. People were invited to take as many cranes as they liked; they were, afterall, made as gifts for these Iraqi refugees.
Creating an exhibit of murals from Iraqi children in Amman Jordan
I returned from Amman with murals for children in Western Massachusets; some of these will be on display in the hallway outside of the KidSpace@MassMOCA Gallery from July 16 through December, 2007: Pieces for Peace.
Thamir Dawood Interview
In preparation for and as part of this exhibit, Sara Gately, a MassMOCA intern initiated a conversation with artist Thamir Dawood and me. You can see Thamir's responses along with photographs he took at one of the mural painting sessions at the Webdah school in April, 2007. With his permission, I have done a bit of editing to try to clarify what he is saying. All of us are very appreciative of the effort and thought he put into organizing this...in English!
See more of Thamir's work at his web site.
Project Farasha: An Art Exchange And Benefit for the Iraqi Children's Art Exchange
An Art Auction and Fundraising Gala
October 13, 2007, 6:00 p.m.
Periscope Cellars and Gallery
1410 62 St. @ Hollis, Emeryville, CA
Children can also participate through a community workshop where they will collaborate on a series of murals begun by Iraqi children.
• MOCHA - Museum of Children's Art, Oakland-August 2, 2007
• Arab Cultural and Community Center, San Francisco-September 1st, 2007
For more information about the workshops and the fundraising event, visit http://www.projectfarasha.org/
The 1,000 Cranes Project
Beginning in October, 2006 children at Clarksburg Elementary School in North Adams Massachusetts, under the direction of teacher Shannon Toye began a project to fold 1,000 Peace Cranes. According to Japanese legend, a wish will be granted if one thousand cranes are folded.
The cranes were presented to Fr. Nabil Haddad, Jordanian partner to ICAE in The Webdah School and Family Center on his March 3 visit to Northampton, Massachusetts. Claudia Lefko delivered the cranes - a wish for peace in the Middle East from children in the USA - to the teachers, children and families at the Webdah School in April, 2007.
Paper cranes in a bowl
We unpacked the strings of cranes and hung them in our project room along with the MassMOCA mural. Hundreds of cranes that were not on strings sat in trays and bowls on tables, enabling children and parents to look closely at the beautiful paper and careful folding; many had messages on them. The loose cranes are there and available for children and adults to take.
