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2010

Kids’ Guernica

Kids’ Guernica 2010

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Florida State University

T.K. Wetherell, PresidentLawrence G. Abele, Provost & VP for Academic Affairs

Sally McRorie, Dean, College of Visual Arts, Theatre & Dance

Advisory Council

Jack Freiberg, Assoc. Dean, CVAT&D David Gussak, Art Education

Lynn Hogan, Assoc. Dean, CVAT&DCameron Jackson, School of Theatre

Adam Jolles, Art History Allys Palladino-Craig, Museum of Fine Arts

Patty Phillips, School of Dance Francis Salancy, Foundation, Asst. Dean, CVAT&D

Russell Sandifer, School of Dance Eric Wiedegreen, Interior Design

Museum of Fine Arts Staff

Allys Palladino-Craig, DirectorViki D. Thompson Wylder, Curator of Education

Jean D. Young, Registrar / Fiscal OfficerTeri R. Yoo, Communications & Museum Studies Coordinator

Wayne T. Vonada Jr., Senior PreparatorCat Silvers & Katherine Reinhardt / EventsDeirdre Carter, Graduate Editorial Assistant

Justine McCullough & Greer Dauphin, Graduate Assistants

Kids’ Guernica Project: Interns Hannah Dahm (2008-09), Alison Schaeffler-Murphy (2009-10) and volunteers* below

Volunteer Coordinator: Jenna Mulberry* (2008-09); Joohee Kang*

(2009-10)Assistant Coordinators: Casey Fisch, Joohee Kang

Volunteers and Interns

Elizabeth Beu n Clay Brand n Bethany Bussell n Erin Crosby* n Hannah Dahm* n Emmalee David* n Michele Frederick* n Lauren

Higbee n Katey Ianacone* n Morgan Jones n Hsin-Ying (Cosette) Lin* n Ali Madalinski*

Bridget McNamara n Gina Menduni n Brittany Regis Alison Schaeffler-Murphy* n Elizabeth Shanks*

Support and Organization

The exhibition of the murals of the 2010 Kids’ Guernica was organized by the Florida State University Museum of Fine Arts,

Guest Curator Tom Anderson. Project Staff: Allys Palladino-Craig, Grantwriter / Editor; Jean Young, Fiscal Officer; Teri Yoo,

Communications Officer; Viki D. Thompson Wylder, Educational Programming; Wayne Vonada, Chief Preparator.

KIDS’ GUERNICA International Committee

c/o Dr. Takuya KanedaDepartment of Child Studies, Otsuma Women’s University

12 Sanbancho, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo, 102-8357 JAPANTel/Fax: 81-(0) 280-22-1269E-mail: [email protected]

KIDS’ GUERNICA International Committee Members

RepresentativeTakuya Kaneda (Japan), Otsuma Women’s University

Honorary MemberTadashi Yasuda (Japan), Art Japan Network

Members

Tom Anderson (USA), Florida State UniversityBaikuntha Shrestha (Nepal), Sirjana Art Gallery

Ann Cheng Shiang Kuo (Taiwan), National Changhua University of Education

Ian Brown (Australia), University of WollongongBoris Tissot (France), Artist, Paris

Gabriel Felder (Italy), RainbowBanibrata Poddar (India), Rotary Club, Mumbai

Asit Poddar (India), Artist, CalcuttaKae Matsuura (Japan)

Alexandris Evangelos (Greece)Bernd Gockel (Germany)

Pio d’ Emilia (Italy)Marco Braghero (Italy), Peace Waves

Hatto Fischer (Greece), Poiein Kai Prattein

Website: kids-guernica.org/Keiko Hoshino, webmaster

Takao Nagahara, website photographer

The ART&DESIGN for Social Justice Symposium focuses on how the tools and inherent abilities within the areas of art and design can be utilized in addressing issues confronting less advantaged groups within our local communities, states, regions or world. The event is designed to generate synergy, spawn collaborative proj-ects among participants, create new scholarly initiatives, and allow examination of the role that art and design plays in the telling of a broader social narrative. The 2010 Symposium will be held in association with the 15th anniversary of the Kids’ Guernica Inter-national peace mural project, and will involve workshops, exhibits and events preceding the actual Symposium.

The ART&DESIGN for Social Justice Symposium is sponsored by the Department of Interior Design and the Department of Art Edu-cation at Florida State University. The main symposium events will be held January 18, 2010 (Martin Luther King Holiday) on the FSU campus. Symposium events and details can be found on its web-site: http://interiordesign.fsu.edu/symposium.

This program is sponsored in part by:

The City of Tallahassee State Partners Grant Initiative and the Leon County Cultural Development Grant Program, both administered by the Council on Culture and Art.

Guest Curator / Author:

Tom Anderson holds the Jessie Lovano-Kerr Chair in the Gradu-ate Institute for Art Education at Florida State University and is a founding member of The Kids’ Guernica Peace Mural Project. He can be reached at [email protected].

Design: Julienne Mason, JJKLM Design

Printer: Durra-Print, Tallahassee, Florida

©2009

Florida State UniversityMuseum of Fine Arts

College of Visual Arts, Theatre & DanceAll Rights Reserved


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Fifteen Years of Kids’ Guernica

This year, 2010, makes fifteen years of international cooperation by artists, arts administrators, art teachers, community activists, and most importantly, the children of the world, toward the goal of constructing world peace through a locally specific, globally envisioned peace project called The Kids’ Guer-nica Peace Mural Project. It might strike one as grandiloquent to say we are constructing world peace through community art making except for the fact that the entire project is circumscribed by local specificity. Every mural is locally conceived and locally constructed in relation to local conditions and concerns. And every mural is a peacemaking process in its very construc-tion that proceeds, sometimes through stops and starts as each group learns the lessons of cooperative activity and respect and tolerance for our fellow human beings. Then the mural serves as an ambassador to others in other places and other cultures in expressing what it means to be Greek or Japa-nese or American, and more specifically to be a kid from Athens or Nagasaki or Tallahassee. That’s what we mean by global vision for constructing peace through local specificity.

In the Beginning

Fifteen years ago, the small group who initiated this project could scarcely have imagined what it would become today: a venture encompassing hun-dreds of murals from more than 40 countries, all painted by children of the world. I became involved in organizing the first mural workshop, in 1995, when I was approached by Toshifumi Abe, an art education professor from Osaka, Japan, with the idea of a children’s mural exchange to commemo-rate the fiftieth anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima. Abe was represent-ing two other co-founders, Tadashi Yasuda of the cultural organization Arts Japan, and Professor Kaoru Mizuguchi. Abe had read some of my work on community mural making and wanted to utilize that paradigm for an interna-tional children’s peace project. He had seen the movie Schindler’s List and recognized in this movie that Schindler, a German national and Nazi affiliate, recognized that his community was larger than those who were just like him, and he risked everything to save Jewish lives. Said Abe, “We all belong to our immediate community and to go beyond it is not easy. So this project can be likened to building a bridge between communities, a bridge of peace.”

Abe called me in June of 1995 and asked that I coordinate the Tallahas-see children’s mural and have it ready for presentation two months later, before the August 5th anniversary of the nuclear weapon being dropped on Hiroshima. He requested that it be the exact same size as Picasso’s famous anti-war painting, Guernica: 3.5x7.76 meters: approximately 11 feet tall by 26 feet wide. This then was the paradigm set by the first mural painted in Tallahassee: that is, a peace painting by children, the size of a mural but on canvas so it could move from one place to another to stimulate a similar peace workshop in Japan.

To execute the Tallahassee mural, I recruited an adult mural team consisting of artistic director Linda Hall, an established community-oriented muralist, and four undergraduate Florida State University art education majors. The children’s team consisted primarily of fifteen mural painting veterans recruit-ed from the Fourth Avenue Cultural Enrichment (FACE) program directed by Jill Harper. These children, between the ages of nine and fifteen, had executed several inner city murals already. Completing the core team were five children representing socio-economically privileged lifestyles. With the cooperation of Director Gay Drennon, we were also able to tie into the weeklong Very Special Arts Florida festival at the 621 Gallery, where the mural was painted. Thus, about 75 to 100 Very Special Arts participants also contributed to the mural. In this sense, the Tallahassee workshop was consciously inclusive, commu-nity-based, locally specific in its design, and directed to socially instrumental purposes. We wanted to provide empowerment and validation to as many

Takuya Kaneda I am of the same opinion that we need to be free in our imagination to develop empathy for other people, as this is a precondition for peace.

—Hatto Fischer

Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), Guernica, Paris, June 4, 1937, oil on canvas, 349.3 x 776.6 cm, Museo Nacional, Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain. Image © ARS, NY. Photo credit: Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY.

[Above] Drawing from a school workshop in Greece with a white dove and the legend “peace.” [Below] The first mural created in the United States, painted in 1995 in Tallahassee, Florida.


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types of children as possible through this project. As emphasized by Toshifu-mi Abe, our philosophy was to think globally and act locally.

In this first workshop, the concept of peace was explored, not only in ab-stract universal terms, but also in concrete and specific terms. The workshop began with a presentation to the core mural team about World War II and particularly about the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Beyond the obvious point of wanting the children to know what we were doing and why it was important, the secondary point was to let them know who else was participating, to whom they were sending the mural, and for what reasons. Toward that end, Maruyama Yasushi, a native of Hiroshima, told the children about the effects of the atomic bomb and about Hiroshima then and now. Ide Kumiko, a native of Tokyo, told the children about what it is like to be a child in Japan, and particularly what the children to whom we’d be sending the mural are like. There was discussion about war and peace and their causes, what Japanese children like to do, how they spend their time, and so on, which led to an impromptu lesson in which most of the children learned to fold an origami crane.

At that point, through cooperative interaction, the theme of the Tallahassee mural began to crystallize. What could we do to help the children of Japan understand who we are and what we like to do? We decided we could sym-bolically send gifts to the children in Japan that would help them understand what we value and care about. We decided to paint self-portraits holding the things we cared about most. These would be our gifts of peace. A Gift of Peace became our theme and title. Another discussion generated a list of possible gifts that describe the American character, particularly through ob-jects and activities valued by the children. Further discussion centered on how we would get these gifts to Japan. One adult team member suggested that the children could fly, as in the book Tar Beach (Ringgold, 1991). Many of the children knew this story and agreed, enthusiastically. Children then ren-dered themselves on paper, taking off and flying, carrying gifts that included, among other things, peace signs, fried chicken and French fries, a chocolate milk shake, skateboards, a rap CD, kittens, American flags, sports equipment, Nike tennis shoes, and a Sweet Valley Twins novel.

The execution of the mural itself took place over the course of about a week, during which time children with special needs visited the 621 Gallery work space, engaging in mural making and in other activities. Inspired again by Faith Ringgold, the adult mural team decided to use her quilting device as a compositional structure to give everyone equal access to expressing them-selves in the mural and to still execute a product, overall, of high aesthetic quality. The solution was to give each special arts student a square of his or her own which together formed the border around the primary composition. Many of the exceptional needs children executed symbolic gifts to send to Ja-pan including peace signs, a steel drum CD, kittens, American flags, a lizard, flowers, and so on. Many others were not able either to integrate the concept or to execute it, but painted freely in their designated square nonetheless.

The American mural process, then, was one in which an adult mural team pro-vided the content and broad theme of peace, as well as the conceptual foun-dation and compositional structure. Children, in cooperation with the adults, developed the specific theme and title, A Gift of Peace, and specific content and imagery fitting the theme. West African drumming and dancing, celebrat-ing the FACE team’s African-American roots accompanied the opening exhibi-tion. All in all, the American mural workshop was a process celebrating the multiple identities, abilities, and subcultures of America, and the empower-ment of each in the pursuit of the universal theme of world peace.

Professor Abe came from Japan to videotape almost the entire Tallahassee workshop for his research. In addition, Art Japan hired a professional video crew from Florida-based Seminole Productions to provide raw footage for

[Above] Toshifumi Abe with the Tallahassee Mural. [Right] A Fourth Avenue Cultural Enrichment program participant mentors a younger Very Special Arts child on a section of the mural. [Below] Performers from the Florida State University Department of Dance at the Museum of Fine Arts celebration.


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what was to become a documentary on this project. At the invitation of Art Japan, I took the American children’s mural to Japan, where I was privileged to be a small part of and observe the Japanese children’s peace mural work-shop. The workshop was held at the Tokushima Museum of Modern Art. The facilities and resources mustered by the Japanese for this project made me feel like the Tallahassee mural was executed in spartan conditions, or at least by the seat of our pants. The working spaces in Florida, a classroom at FSU and the non-air conditioned space at the 621 Gallery in Tallahassee’s Rail-road Square art district paled in comparison to workshop and display space in the gleaming, almost new Tokushima Museum of Modern Art, in which an air conditioned, 40 by 80 foot workspace was provided. Three museum staff members, a full time curator and two assistants, were assigned to the proj-ect. The entire floor in the Tokushima Museum workshop space was covered with blue plastic tarp, the cost of which no doubt exceeded the entire budget of the Tallahassee mural. The museum supplied a canvas that was cut and professionally sewn to the right dimensions at the factory, and state of the art brushes and supplies. Sakura Corporation supplied paint for the entire project. This, compared to the Tallahassee experience, which many American art educators will recognize as typical, of scrambling for everything and work-ing on a shoestring budget.

The process of the Tokushima workshop also was different from the Talla-hassee workshop in interesting ways. The relative time spent in consultation and achieving consensus among mural team members was an obvious dif-ference as was the manner in which decisions were made. In Tallahassee, Linda Hall and I met a couple of times before the children’s workshop to talk about format, theme, and strategy. We discussed the mural a couple more times on the phone. We assigned the rest of the adult mural team, consist-ing of the Japanese presenters and four art education students, their tasks. Working from a bare-bones conceptual foundation, we made many decisions about content, form, and strategy spontaneously and “on the fly” during the course of the weeklong workshop. The fact that choices were made in a spon-taneous, open-ended manner meant that the final form and content of the American mural were not finally known until the mural was done. The pro-cess also was open-ended and somewhat divergent in terms of participants’ roles. Certain members of the adult mural team were more interested and involved than others and took more central roles as a matter of course. Like-wise, children became more central or more peripheral depending on their level of participation and interest. This fluid definition of who would do what and how much also affected the outcome. For example, the borders that we had saved for the exclusive use of Very Special Arts students were partially painted by core mural team members who wanted to do more, and the pri-mary composition was partially painted by special students who had the skills and the desire. This open-ended and divergent process at times resulted in a rather chaotic method, but we believe that it also gave everyone an equal opportunity to contribute, to take ownership to the extent they wanted to and were capable of.

In Tokushima, the process was more formalized and deliberate. Overall, it seemed, too, that both adults’ and children’s roles were rather more fixed than in Tallahassee. Everyone seemed to know what his or her role was com-ing in, and there didn’t seem to be much flux on the issue. The process of consultation was almost ritualistic. The mural team met frequently, and at some length, every day before the children came and after they left, allow-ing everyone to speak, and reaching consensus on all significant aspects of the project before any action was taken. The children were also integrated into the consensus-building and decision-making process in a much more formalized manner than in the American workshop. Unlike the workshop in Tallahassee, there were formal sessions that began and ended each studio experience in which the children were asked to express their opinions about what the content of the mural should be and how that content should be ex-pressed. In short there was an attempt to gain consensus from the workers at

In 2009, the Tallahassee Mural is built of quilt-like blocks of painting from area schools. Picasso’s Cubist legacy has been incorporated into the faces of the children’s portraits.


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each stage of the process. Only later would I understand just how important these meetings and everyone’s attendance and consensus are in Japanese society. Innovation during the mural making process seemed to require group consensus. The Japanese children and adults seemed to be more conscious than the Americans of how one change affects the whole.

It also became apparent that the Japanese children had a much more coop-erative tendency than the American children. They had much more inclination to work in groups than the American children, who tended to work singly, or at most in pairs. The American sense of individual ownership was expressed by one child when she said to another child about her self portrait, “This is my picture, don’t touch it.” Again, my language skills limited my ability to know for sure, but I did not detect this attitude at all in the Japanese children, through their postures or interactions, or through my interpreters. Although individual Japanese children did initiate images and ideas, it was the norm during the actual painting process for kids to be working on components of the mural together. The only time this happened in the American process was in paint-ing the background, a task it seemed that the American children recognized as a sort of bothersome necessity to be dispensed with before they got to the “real stuff”—their own individual expressions of self. Toshifumi recently commented that these two murals were the first brother and sister of Kids’ Guernica and first expressed how we are all alike and all different.

The Philosophy of Kids’ Guernica

Children in the first workshops were asked to envision how they could promote peace as citizens of their country and the world, in a locally and culturally specific manner, and that became the project paradigm. As articulated in the initial project statement, we believed that in spite of the fact that the children and sponsors of this project are of different cultural backgrounds, certain human drives and concerns are universal, such as the desire to live safely in peace, free from war or the threat of war. We also believe that since art is at root an instrument of culture, the children of different countries participating in this study will express these universal concerns differently, each according to their own locally specific needs and criteria. Finally, we believe that the power and potential of the project lies in this idea of unity of purpose and diversity of approach. Through seeing the multiple paths we all take to reach common goals, it is our hope that understanding, tolerance, and respect one for another will grow. This, indeed, may be a path to world peace.

From an educational perspective, according to Toshifumi Abe, a primary ben-efit for children in addressing the issue of peace through art is that it fosters both independence of mind and (individual and collective) identity. Working together establishes concern in children for each other and eventually a sense of belonging to a community. Says Abe, “This means every mural and every mural process is very precious for us. In this way each mural is a nail or a board in the collective bridge of peace.”

With current developments and an organic evolution in leadership, other ideas have come to the fore. Especially of note are the efforts and ideas of Hatto Fischer, currently a prime mover and coordinator of the project in Eu-rope, the Middle East, and Africa. International coordinator, Takuya Kaneda, in a recent email, told Fischer “without your tremendous efforts, the current expansion of this project could not be achieved.” Indeed, Fischer reaches out tirelessly through the Web and travels throughout the world to achieve the ends of the project. Hatto denies being a leader, or the leader, saying of his leadership role, “Kids’ Guernica is highly flexible and dynamic and resides on individual initiatives as much as on collaborative work. Like Maya, my daugh-ter would say, modern society challenges all of us to work together free of any hierarchy if we are to live the dream of equality and peace.” But through Fischer’s influence, the abuse or potential abuse of children has become a spotlight issue for Kids’ Guernica, in addition to our long-time focus on chil-

[Above] Painting at the Tokushima workshop in 1995. [Below] The Tokushima Mural.


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dren suffering under consequences of war, and youth who are not integrated into a community. In a document submitted to the European Union, Fischer said: “By developing insights through painting collectively, [children] enter at informal level a collaborative learning process, which includes sharing materi-als, working together by integrating the ideas of others and creating a whole which is larger than the sum of the parts. Most crucial is that by responding to war, conflicts, violence, abuse etc., these children do not only respond by letting them go beyond the immediate situation they confront, but they begin to analyze reasons for war and violence…. In that sense they learn to express human grief and pain without resorting to the kind of [actions that] would trap them in vicious cycles of revenge and aggression.”

The Kids’ Guernica Peace Mural Project has always emphasized positive im-ages of peace and the construction of community as opposed to anti-war imagery and foci, believing that energy given to something is manifest in its forms and results in the world. There are many levels by which the network works. The key nodal points of communication are coordinators and those who undertook the initiatives in the local environments. By continuing to work together both at informal friendship and formal, professional level, the art of networking continues to explore possibilities of new initiatives and spaces for exhibitions. The main coordinators ensure that those who undertake the initiatives are recognized by the others and integrated into the Kids’ Guer-nica family. Everything takes place on the basis of voluntary practice while consultation is given freely with further information on the websites. Some key guidelines hold: no money flows and there is complete independence of each local initiative. If an exhibition is organized, the local organizer attempts to provide accommodation and food and coverage of the exhibition costs while all those coming from abroad to participate pay for their own travel expenses.

The First Five Years

The initial concept was that the mural exchange would be between the United States and Japan but the vision almost immediately evolved when it became apparent to all of us that peace in the world is not simply a Japanese-Ameri-can issue. Consequently, Art Japan contacted Bordeaux, France, and estab-lished a Kids’ Guernica web site. I contacted many of my colleagues: Abdul-lah Al-Muhanna, in Kuwait; Ian Brown, in Wollongong, Australia; Rita Irwin, in British Columbia, Canada; and Beverly Fletcher, in Fort Worth, Texas, USA. Toshifumi contacted and introduced Kids’ Guernica through his art education network, and we were very fortunate to find Kaneda Takuya whose specialty is international understanding through art. Takuya contacted Nepal and India. Then Toshifumi also contacted Papua New Guinea; Chai-Woo Ro, of Korea, and Dr. Ann Cheng Shiang Kuo, from Taiwan.

The fifth mural workshop was organized by Takuya Kaneda in Kathmandu, Nepal, where, said Kaneda, “I knew many Nepalese artist friends since my wife came from Nepal.” He continued, “I introduced [the project to] Mr. Bai-kuntha Shrestha, one of my artist friends in Kathmandu and he organized the first Kids’ Guernica workshop in Nepal in 1996. I visited Kathmandu when the peace mural was exhibited near the old palace of Kathmandu. The main theme of the mural was Dream of Peace in the twenty-five hundredth year of Buddhism, and the pride of the nation and its culture. Two thousand, five hundred years ago, Buddha was born in Nepal. Buddhism is still alive in Ne-pal although the majority of Nepalese people believe in Hinduism. Nepal is a multi-ethnical nation, which consists of various ethnic groups. At that time,” continued Takuya, “I called Mr. Asit Poddar, my oldest friend in India, to Kath-mandu to see the Kids’ Guernica painting. He came to Kathmandu with his family and I [was glad to] see him after many years. He was very impressed by the painting and the idea of Kids’ Guernica and in the next year, 1997, he organized the first Kids’ Guernica workshop in India and introduced this pro-ject to his artist friend in Italy. Through his friend, Gabriel Felder came to know

[Above] Organizers Takuya Kaneda and Hatto Fischer with Athenian schoolchildren. [Below] The Papua New Guinea Mural on exhibition in 1997.


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about this project and organized a workshop in Italy in 2001.”

The project began growing organically and almost logarithmically at this point, by word of mouth from one activist to another. It’s impossible for me, here, to chronicle all the events that took place, but in describing some of them I hope to give the reader the flavor of the whole. For one example in Fort Worth, Texas, from May 1 to June 25, 1997, Beverly Fletcher and Jane Edwards di-rected a workshop at Paschal High School with 16 and 17 year-old students. Reported Jane Edwards: “[The students] were so excited and pleased that they were asked to be part of a worldwide project of this magnitude. I shared with the students the Kids’ Guernica packet and pictures of murals from other nations. I asked them to give great thought to what peace means to them, and if they had one wish for their friends in Japan, and around the world, what would it be? They brainstormed for the mural and made sketches of their ideas. We talked about peace and their many interpretations and meanings and came to a unanimous decision that our mural would be a giant fish bowl (our world). Each student would depict him or herself as a fish swim-ming across our waters to embrace our fellow man while carrying our peace statement of love and goodwill to Japan and all nations and people, for we are one people united in love. Ju Jun Kim, an exchange student from Germany, painted the dove, our U.S. peace symbol, with an olive branch in its mouth as the focal point of the mural watching over all of us, we people of the U.S.A., Japan and all nations, as one people joined together in love and peace.”

During this same period, Asit Poddar returned to India and began planning for a Kids’ Guernica mural workshop there. During this time he had a personal exhibition of his work in Seoul and just happened to meet Professor Chairo of Inchon University on the plane. They discussed the mural project in the con-text of the conflict between North and South Korea and Asit’s forced move to India (West Bengal) when his homeland of East Bengal became Bangladesh. Asit related that, “As a child, when I remembered my village I cried in my bed at night. Only I knew the pain of being divided from friends, school, and the environment.” Dr. Chairo signed on, on that plane ride, to coordinate a mural in South Korea. Asit met with Mr. Yasuda from Art Japan on that same trip and they all agreed to have Asit coordinate a mural in Calcutta in November and December, 1996. Asit worked with 20 students from 10 schools and the cel-ebration was attended by “Dr. Chairo from Korea, Mr. Yasuda, and Dr. Kaneda and his family from Japan, Mr. Raju from Nepal, and some artist guests from Germany.” At a 1997 Kyoto exhibition, Asit also came to know Dr. Ann Kuo of Taiwan, Dr. Ian Brown of Australia, Boris Tissot of France, Professor Abe of Japan, Gabriel Felder of Italy [all of whom were early event coordinators] and many children from Papua New Guinea. Asit also attended the Kids’ Guernica exhibition in Taiwan at the Taipei Modern Art Museum. It was at that time that Takuya Kaneda and Asit and others agreed to put together a huge fifth year anniversary Kids’ Guernica Exhibition in Kathmandu, in the year 2000.

Takuya Kaneda was very active during the time leading to the Kathmandu cel-ebration. In Japan, Professor Mizuguchi, Keiko Hoshino, Mr. Nagahara many others started working with the peace mural project due to Takuya’s influ-ence. Gabriel Felder coordinated a mural in Brunico, northern Italy. In Mum-bai, Banibrata Poddar coordinated a mural under the auspices of the Rotary Club. In France, Boris Tissot started another mural. Ann Kuo coordinated a 1997 mural celebrating Taiwan’s multicultural heritage including Taiwanese, Chinese, and indigenous icons and symbols. And each activity was a local act to build an international bridge of peace, engaging adults and children brought together by planned and unplanned human encounters, through word of mouth, having a common desire for peace.

The Fifth Anniversary Celebration in Kathmandu

In December 2000, The Kids’ Guernica International Exhibition was held in an open-air space located in the center of Kathmandu. A large number of

[Above top] Texas Mural, circa 1997. [Above] Taiwan Mural, 1997, National Changhua University of Education. [Below] Images from the gathering in Nepal in 2000.


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peace murals from different countries were framed with bamboo. Takuya Kaneda reports that, “It was really spectacular that all colorful murals were filled with wind against the blue sky and the white Himalayan Mountains. Gabriel, Banibrata, and Ann brought some children from Italy, Taiwan, and India for this exhibition. The children had a good time in Kathmandu, stay-ing together in one hotel and discussing with Nepalese children what they could do for world peace. Baikunthaman Sresstha of Nepal coordinated the celebration. Kathmandu was chosen for both practical reasons (it was in-expensive) and spiritual reasons described above. The King and Queen of Nepal inaugurated the exhibition in Kathmandu. In front of the children they released two white doves. Unfortunately, the King and Queen were killed six months later, in 2001. After this tragedy, the political conflict between the government and the underground Maoist group became more serious and took on the character of a civil war, Eventually, peace ensued and in 2007 the Maoist group participated in the interim government of Nepal. The Maoists became a leading party after the general election in 2008 and the govern-ment decided to legally abolish the monarchy. Last year Nepal changed from the kingdom to the republic. For the last decade, Kids’ Guernica has greatly expanded while Nepal politically changed. A video of the Kathmandu experi-ence and several other Kids’ Guernica events can be seen at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yUEzEEqT92k.

The International Steering Committee Comes to Be

Tadashi Yasuda, from Art Japan, thought of Kathmandu as the final event and the end of this project, but the participant children and adults wished to continue it. So in the year 2000, the Kids’ Guernica International (Steering) Committee was formed with Takuya Kaneda being selected by the members of the committee as coordinator. This made a formal structure for commu-nication and leadership in what continued to be an informal organization, and especially was helpful in establishing a Web presence on the Internet, and a way to respond to people who wanted to participate, as well as a way to share resources with those who wanted to but couldn’t afford to partici-pate. The committee was formed by those who participated in the fifth an-niversary celebration of Kids’ Guernica in Kathmandu, Nepal, including Bai-kuntha Shrestha, Ann Cheng Shiang Kuo, Gabriel Felder, as well as Asit and Banibrata Poddar from India and others not in attendance such as Ian Brown, and, myself, Tom Anderson. On this occasion, Mr. Yasuda handed over all his management related to Kids’ Guernica to the international committee. In this meeting, also, Gabriel proposed his idea to hold another Kids’ Guer-nica International Exhibition in the Italian Alps in the following year. “Kids’ Guernica from the Himalayas to the Alps” seemed a wonderful idea, and a plan was made to make it so. The international steering committee has been expanded in a democratic manner over the years to include many other active participants in the project.

The Second Five Years A Response to �/11

A major exhibition was to be held in Italy beginning on September 15, 2001, but with the suicide plane bombing and destruction of New York’s Twin Tow-ers we were unable to come together on that date, since air traffic almost everywhere was completely grounded. We postponed the gathering, then, until the middle of December. This gave us more than two months to regroup, during which time the European organizers and Takuya Kaneda emailed me and wondered if we could do an American post-9/11 mural. I knew it was the right thing to do, so I suggested to my graduate students in Panama City, Florida, that we stand up for peace in the midst of the turmoil, rather than descending to the desire for revenge. Two doctoral students, Michelle Creel and Jerry Pilcher, stepped forward to lead the workshop and several others also contributed. Elementary students from Oakland Terrace, Northside, Patronis, and St. Andrews Elementary Schools, and students from Mowat Middle School painted the mural, assisted by students from A.D. Harris and

[Above] Among the participants in Nepal in 2000 are Banibrata Poddar from India (at the left) and Juliette Tissot-Vidal (wearing red at center). [Right] The King and Queen of Nepal. [Below] The first Nepalese mural in 1996.


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Arnold High Schools, Gulf Coast College students, Florida State University students and local art teachers. The main theme was What Peace Means to Me. A large angel figure centers the mural, representing those who died. She is holding a World Trade Center tower in each hand. She stands in front of an all-seeing eye, red from crying, that is looking for peace with children of all ethnicities and religions, including Muslim and Christian reaching out to each other. Michelle Creel held writing workshops to diffuse the children’s fear and to search for ways to express hope for the future. Some of these writ-ings occupy the space in the upper right around the rainbow, which signifies hope. The finished mural was exhibited at the Visual Arts Center of Northwest Florida before being sent to Italy. One participating family was so taken with the peace process engaged in this mural that they followed it to Italy for the celebration of peace in the Alps.

The Post-�/11 Gathering in Italy

The December gathering was held at a ski resort in Kronplatz near Brunico (Bruneck, in German), in the Dolomites, in a part of northern Italy that has been contested by Italian and German cultures for centuries. At Kronplatz, more than fifty murals were installed all along the ski slopes on billboard-type frames that were funded by an EU grant secured by coordinator Gabrielle Felder and his colleagues. At the top of the hill were at least 20 of the murals lined up in a bank behind a platform. I brought the American mural with me and it was installed in the last remaining space. We were all very excited that morning, too excited to remember we were cold, because the Dalai Llama was on his way and would be there at noon. Hundreds of children and more than a hundred adults had ridden the chair lifts up the hill to hear His Holi-ness talk with us about peace. Then Pio, one of the organizers got a phone call. “The Dalai Llama isn’t coming,” he said to a couple of us around him. “What!?” I said. “An engine on his plane caught fire and he had to put down in Lisbon,” said Pio. “Thank god he’s safe,” said another committee member, “but what are we going to do?” “Carry on,” said Takuya. And we did. The Burgermeister of the south Tyrol District stepped up as our main speaker. International Coordinator Takuya Kaneda also gave an inspired speech in which he said, in part:

“When we started this Kids’ Guernica project, it was a really tiny seed but now it has grown up to become a big tree with many beautiful flowers. Since this project started, I have been able to meet so many people from different places of the world, and they became good friends of mine. Friendship is es-sential for world peace. If you have friends, you will love their countries, their cultures, and their religions.

“Please look at these peace paintings created by your friends in different places of our planet. You will find differences as well as similarities. Each painting shows a different image of peace, as each child’s face is not the same. This diversity is the richness of our planet. It is my wish that this exhibi-tion will give you a wonderful opportunity to appreciate the diversity of the participating children’s cultural background as well as their strong wish for peace. To understand and accept differences is the first step to creating [a] peaceful world. If you have friends, you will appreciate their differences.

“At last, I would like to emphasize that these beautiful peace paintings are not individual works but collaborative works. Without working together we could not achieve the success we have enjoyed in such a wonderful project. Kids’ Guernica is a symbol of working together toward the peaceful world. I believe that if we have a hope for peace and work together, it will surely come true. I wish all of you to share this dream and to support its realization.”

One of the great accomplishments of the Kronplatz gathering was that it pro-vided a stage for Israeli and Palestinian children to get to know each other and personally explore the possibilities of peace between them. Prof. Don Bar

[Above] Mural completed in Panama City, Florida, in 2001 following the 9-11 bombing in New York and Washington. [Below] Murals installed at Kron-/platz, Italy in 2001.


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On at the Ben Gurion University in Beer Sheva and Prof. Sami Adwan at the Bethlehem University supervised this special project. They were founders of a non-governmental Israeli-Palestinian organization. “Peace Research Institute in the Middle East “(PRIME) in Beit Jala, in Palestine. This organization has been very active in working for a peaceful coexistence of Israeli and Palestin-ian people (kidsguernica.org). They had been trying to find a way to get Pal-estinian and Israeli children together but had been blocked by red tape and governmental borders and cultural boundaries in their home territory. Again, made possible by an EU grant, they were both able to bring their children to Italy to work together. In 2001, they were awarded the International Prize by the Alexander Langer Foundation in Italy.

Tunisia

Again, it’s beyond the scope of this document to describe all the many work-shops that took place the second five years, but I can describe a few just to give the reader a sense of what was going on. For one example, a workshop in Tunisia, in 2003, was coordinated by Alberto Filippone and Mourad En-nar with 30 Tunisian children and youths and five adults from Morocco, ten from Italy and five from France. The theme was peaceful migration. In the mural, four roads run by many people of various cultures, meet in the centre of the painting linking two societies represented on the two sides. This union produces a peace whirl making a new paradigm where the various cultures interact without creating conflicts. The message is explicit: legal migrations supported by different juridical processes, migration based on healthy rules of justice and cohabitation can produce a peace process. . . . For everybody the migration is a bilateral exchange, which enriches both the parts.

The Second Nepal Mural

As another example, the second workshop in Nepal was organized in 2005. Baikutha also led this workshop. It was a collaborative work between chil-dren in the capital city, Kathmandu, and a remote village, Sirubari near the Himalayan foothill. An anti-government Maoist group was very active near the village. The village children painted the first part of the mural. The mural was sent to Kathmandu and finished by children there. This workshop gave a good opportunity to both the children in the village and the city to know each other. After being exhibited in Nepal the completed mural eventually was sent to the

tenth anniversary peace event in Bali.

As reported by Takuya Kaneda, “A boy who had participated in the first work-shop in Nepal in 1996 grew up and worked hard to coordinate the second workshop in 2005. It is remarkable that the Kids’ Guernica project contin-ues through the years through grass roots effort. It’s a longitudinal project that cannot be easily evaluated in the short term. But in the long term,” said Takuya, “I believe that the real result will be found in students’ minds after they grow up. If art education can make an impact upon students, their expe-rience through art will be crystallized and it will change their behaviors when they grow up. In this regard, the Nepalese boy who actively got involved with the second workshop after many years is a good example.”

He is only one of many who have experienced deep, long-term effects from this project. Kids’ Guernica is a rich tapestry of interwoven human experi-ences. As Hatto Fischer put it, “There are countless peace murals all of which have their own unique story. It becomes [useful therefore] to link it with the children and [adults] who participated in it and therefore can tell their own stories.” So let me share a few of those stories, in the teller’s own words.

Boris Tissot

“I discovered the Kids’ Guernica Project at an artist residency at Villa Kujoya-ma in Kyoto in the fall of 1997. I saw a group of children painting a big canvas

[Above] More than fifty murals were installed at Kronplatz in 2001. [Left] Tom Anderson and Takuya Kaneda. [Below] Mural from Tunisia in 2003.


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in the street; they were participating in the Kids’ Guernica Project with great enthusiasm. It was then that I met the generous Yasuda Tadashi who headed Art Japan network and the first stage of the Kids’ Guernica Project 1995-2000. He told me how he had asked children around the world, by Internet, to paint their image of peace on a canvas measuring 3.5 x 7.8 meters (11.5 x 25.5 feet)—the same size as Picasso’s Guernica. I thought it was a beauti-ful way for children to speak through art about the violence in our societies and through meeting other young people their own age and discovering other countries and cultures.

“When I returned to France, I decided to bring the project to Paris, in April 1998, in the Atelier des Enfants at Pompidou Center at the École Vitruve where my daughter Juliette was a student. It was at that time that I met up with an old friend, Michel Cibot. We spoke about the Kids’ Guernica Project and of our own responsibility as citizens to speak out for peace in our daily lives. We must never forget what happened in the twentieth century! Michel Cibot was working for the city of Malakoff, near Paris, and has been involved in the 2001-2010 UNESCO Program for Peace. The city of Malakoff is also a member of the Mundial Conference of Mayors for Peace initiated in 1985 by the mayors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, so we did [a] Kids’ Guernica mural in Malakoff in 1999.

“But first, in 1998, we introduced the students from the École Vitruve grade school in Paris to the city of Guernica, as well as [to] Picasso’s great work Guernica, painted in the context of the Spanish Civil War. We asked them to talk about violence, war and peace. They explained what happened when they got into fights at school during recess and why they got into fights. We talked about the positive and negative feelings we hold inside, and how we must learn to control our anger and the dark side in each of us. We spoke of the respect we must have toward others. One boy talked about his parents’ fighting and their divorce. Others talked about the wars between countries and the violence people were subjected to. One of them spoke of how his grandfather came home crazy at the end of the last war with Germany. An-other spoke of how his father was in Kosovo working for peace.

“We did a lot of painting exercises with the painter Marie-Claude Beck, teach-ing the children how to use colors, invent patterns. After much discussion, the kids voted on the color yellow for peace, and both red and black for War. Each of them made a little sketch for the large painting, and together the class chose to paint the one that represented the idea of the collective group, that ‘Peace is fragmented and War stretches in all four directions: east, west, north, south.’ They spent a week painting the canvas. Their symbol for peace was clasped hands and for war knives and forks. They made stencil drawings of the various elements on the red. [Image for Malakoff, France, at http://www.kids-guernica.org/MuralPage/No16.html]

“For the painting with the school children at the Henri Barbusse grade school in Malakoff in 1999, we showed them pictures of Picasso’s Guernica, as well as photographs from Robert Capa (Bilbao, Mai 1937), Laurent Van Der Stockt (Afghanistan December 1994; Grosny, August 1996). We asked them where they saw images of war and violence. They spoke of TV and newspapers. We asked them to bring newspapers to the class. While we were discussing them, one of the kids in the group thought it would be nice to invent their own newspaper. We decided to do exactly that and discussed the newspaper layout (columns, text, spaces for photos) which they drew on a canvas with grey paint that they applied with sponges, sticks, spatulas… They wrote in red phrases like: Stop the war! Respect people! No mines! A picture can be seen at http://www.kids-guernica.org/WorkshopPage/No23France.html.

“I later went to Kathmandu, Nepal with my daughter Juliette to participate in the inauguration of the Kid’s Guernica 2000 exhibition in the presence of his Majesty King Birendra Bir Bikram Shah. We watched as a pair of white pi-

[Above left] Young artists working in Israel. [Other photographs above] Children in Crete with their mural and the mural being in-stalled. [Below] Mural from France painted in 1998 at the École Vitruve in Paris.


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geons were let free in the air. The pigeons symbolically carried the children’s message of peace around the world. Three months later, the king was killed by a member of his own family. The reality of violence was quick to return. In the exhibition some 53 huge paintings made by children from 19 countries around the world over a period of five years were on display on the Tundhikhel parade ground.

“Seven of the paintings were by Nepali children, made between November and December. How wonderful to witness those powerful images of peace in Nepal, which was in the midst of a civil war. It was fascinating to discover the country, to walk the old cities Kathmandu, Bakhtapur, Pokhara and experi-ence its ancient culture.

“I also initiated a Kids’ Guernica exhibition in the city of Oradour in the Haute Vienne (France) from April 7 to September 30, 2003. The village of Oradour, which is on the outskirts of Limoges and about three hours from Paris and 19 km from Brigueuil, the village of my grandparents that was completely destroyed and its people massacred by the Nazis during World War II. To keep this crucial piece of history alive, a part of the village was never rebuilt. Cre-ated after World War II, the mission of the Centre de la Mémoire (Center of Remembrance) in Oradour is to keep the memory of the tragedy of Oradour-sur-Glane alive for future generations, and to carry out actions that deliver a message of human dignity, reconciliation and peace. On April 7, 2003, about 200 participants gathered at the Centre de la Mémoire in Oradour for the grand unveiling ceremony of a Kids’ Guernica exhibit. Dominique Barrère, director of the Center of Remembrance, organized the event. Five paintings drawn by children, from France (Oradour), Spain (Guernica), Czech Republic (Lidice), Belarus (Khatyn) and Greece (Kalavrita) were displayed inside the hall, while eight paintings from Nepal, Sri Lanka, Cambodia, India/Bengal, Bosnia, Algeria, Ethiopia and Japan (Hiroshima) were displayed outside. The selected paintings were all from countries that had been affected by war, regional conflicts, ethnic violence, or destroyed by the Nazis. Hiroshima, of course, was where the first atomic bomb was dropped. The children from Guernica, Lidice, Khatyn, Kalavrita and Oradour attended the opening cer-emony. The 13 paintings spoke to the message of a peaceful future for gen-erations to come, and the hope that the past will never again be repeated.”

At the time of this writing Boris is organizing a new Kids’ Guernica project in Paris, Quai des Grands Augustins, in the workshop where Picasso painted Guernica in 1937, for display in the 15-year anniversary exhibition.

Juliette Tissot-Vidal

“In April 1998, at age nine, when I was a pupil at the École Vitruve in the twen-tieth arrondissement of Paris, I took part in a class project which consisted in making a painting on canvas. A team from the Pompidou Centre came to work with my class, to guide us in painting techniques and reflections on how through painting we could promote peace. My first experience with the Kids’ Guernica Project was for me very empowering. It made me feel strong as if this project could eradicate evil, sadness and war in the entire world. Here I was, just one human being among so many others and yet the project made me feel like I could save the world. As Parisian kids, my class focused on daily violence in the school playground, in our neighborhood, and in the world. Making this painting opened our minds to other children and other cultures.

“While painting on the École Vitruve canvas, we had discussions with our teachers and the team of painters. It made us realize how huge this struggle was to attain peace and that we could use art to fight injustice. With our painting, we were committing ourselves to a project with high expectations, a sense of commitment and confidence driven by the creative process.

“As I look back, I tell myself that it was probably utopian, and yet at the time

[Above] Picasso’s atelier, selected for a 2009 mural location by Boris Tissot. [Below] In the town of Guernica, in Spain, a mosaic pays tribute to Picasso’s painting.


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and for many years, during other events with Kids’ Guernica, I really thought that we would defeat war and win the peace. The fact of bringing together dif-ferent peoples I thought could only lead to more peace, and on further reflec-tion I think that painting on this canvas in the École Vitruve was a project that has become one of the most meaningful experiences in my life.

“Later when I was 12 years old, I joined the exhibition of Katmandu in Nepal in December 2000, to celebrate the millennium and the beginning of the twenty-first century. This adventure was really fantastic, as I visited a country that I knew nothing about. The long flight was necessary for me to understand what an incredible adventure I was about to embark on. Meeting children from the entire world (Japan, India, Italy, Russia, the United States, and Ne-pal) was magical. I was overwhelmed with joy, and I felt so proud to be among all these children, who had also made collective paintings, and who were sharing this feeling of being able to end war and violence. They too had been helped by adults to undertake their quest for peace. The power I had felt two years before was confirmed once again! There I was, standing in front of all the canvases, giving a speech in front of the King of Nepal, representing my school and discovering the works of other kids and the culture of another country. Most of all, I was facing new images which have remained forever in my heart and mind.

“Shortly after, the King of Nepal was assassinated in a coup d’état. Overnight, everything changed! After the celebrations, the discovery of extraordinary landscapes, we could no longer go out, and had to hide for fear of being spot-ted. We did not understand what was happening outside, but protests and violence had broken out! We could hear gunshots, screams and were told of conflicts, and rumors of war. This experience was very trying; I could feel the danger, witness the riots without understanding the reasons behind them. We were forced to realize that our utopian dream could not last and that this art exhibition did not solve everything! This seemed paradoxical but we were keeping this event in mind as a strength and it made us continue to carry on believing that peace can still triumph; our combined energies and minds were an undeniable force that still made us feel strong.

“Overall, my stay in Nepal represented a true human experience which has remained imprinted in my mind and heart forever. Today, I am an adult and I realize that my commitment to Kids’ Guernica is much more than a col-lective school painting, which can be linked to other canvases and children worldwide. A simple action on Earth may be seen as a mere grain of sand in a desert of hope, but it also represents one grain among many other grains of sand that make up our planet. In fact, I have still kept in touch with some of the children through letters, and when we do meet each other again, as we did in Italy in 2002 for another Kids’ Guernica exhibition, the energy remains intact, just as it was at the École Vitruve or during the Nepal exhibition.

“Now I am older, and am more aware of the difficulty behind the Kids’ Guer-nica mission. Yet, I continue to believe that this human adventure was essen-tial. This project is magnificent because it bridges all differences. The notion of otherness revealed itself to me; then rich and complex, this notion is now with me and makes me humble and has led me to reflect on the human condition, and has led me to change my perception on life and on the world. Thanks to Kids’ Guernica, I think that I now know how much political signifi-cance art can have; the kind that joins human beings together, with difficulty indeed, but the kind that is necessary to fight for cultural diversity and human dignity, for the respect of differences, and above all, for human kindness.

“I do not believe that this project was done in vain; conveying peace through art and creation is necessary. The road ahead of us is long and difficult, but I still continue my commitment in the Kids’ Guernica Project as an adult, as the Project continues in Florida, USA, with the 2010 exhibition.”

[Top] The mural that was a collaboration of Sirubari (Himalayan village) and Kathmandu children in 2005. [Above left] The War Is Over, Athens, Greece, 2005. [Above right and below] Cultural entertainment in Greece in 2007 with the exhibition of murals there.


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Sachi Kaneda

“I participated in Kids’ Guernica project for the first time in 2000 when I was twelve years old. In that time, the Kids’ Guernica international exhibition was held in Kathmandu, the capital of my mother’s country, Nepal. Since then, I participated in several projects including the international exhibition in Kro-nplatz, Italy (2001), the peace event in Tokyo (2003) and the peace event in Crete (2006) and Chios (2007), Greece. At the peace event in Crete, I gave a speech at the opening of the event, which referred to my experience in Nepal. I said: ‘My mother always told me Nepal was a very peaceful country but today it has become a country of conflict. The government and an anti-government group have been fighting each other for many years. I heard there are many young soldiers, the same teenagers as we are.’

“A few years ago, when I went to Nepal to attend my cousin’s marriage cer-emony, I faced a very terrible thing. On the way from my auntie’s house to Kathmandu, our car was suddenly stopped by the army soldiers because an anti-government group attacked a village near the mountain road. I could hear many gunshots between the army and the anti-government group. We had to stop in the darkness for nearly five hours. I felt the hours were very long like days. Luckily, we reached Kathmandu and returned to Japan. I will never forget this terrible experience. I realize that I could escape from Nepal to Japan but most of Nepalese people cannot leave their motherland.

“Why has peaceful Nepal changed? There must be some reasons to fight such as poverty and social injustice. However, violence will never be a so-lution but will only worsen the situation. Such social disorder makes poor people much poorer, as I saw recently in Nepal.

“To create a peaceful society, I believe imagination is very important. Imagina-tion in this way means to imagine others’ suffering and happiness. Imagine yourself as a little boy, who has to face bombing every day, the boy who is forced to have a rifle, and imagine what he really wants to do, and how he could be happy. That is the imagination of Kids’ Guernica. For me, Kids’ Guer-nica is not a mere art project. I learned many things through the process of preparing the peace events. Especially, participating in Kids’ Guernica gives me precious opportunities to meet wonderful people, children and adults, from different countries. In this sense, one of the good aspects of this project is connecting people from different places of the world through art. Personally knowing each other is the first step to understanding, tolerance and friend-ship.”

A World of Murals

Similar experiences were shared by thousands of children and hundreds of adults all over the world in the second five years. A mural workshop was held in Shanghai, China, in 2004, at Xiang Shan Elementary School. One mural re-sulting from an integrated curriculum unit at Mukaigaoka Junior High School in Kawasaki, Japan, depicts a fetus holding the earth, entitled Kakegaenonai Inochi (Precious Life). It means the importance of the birth of life and all the lives are precious so they should be equally treated. Another mural featur-ing a giant dove of peace was done at Ghanshyamdas Saraf Girls’ College in Mumbai, India, in April 2002. Other celebrations and mural exhibitions were held in Vorarlbrg, Austria and Oradour, France, in 2003. In 2001 a mural was developed in Carlsbad, California, depicting the American flag’s stars and stripes as children of all ethnicities, and another was painted in Terra Mirim, Brazil, depicting nature as the source of peace. These and many, many other murals can be seen at http://www.kids-guernica.org/.

[Top] Spanish mural painted in 2003. [Above] Ubud, Bali, football field exhibition in 2005 with the Australian and Tennessee murals in the foreground. [Left] Organiz-ers at the Bali gathering: Takuya Kaneda, Keiko Hoshino, and Baikuntha Shrestha.


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Bali

The tenth anniversary exhibition and workshop was held in Ubud, Bali, Indo-nesia, on the week of August 17, 2005. The date coincided with the sixtieth anniversary of Indonesia’s independence from Japan and many people from Japan attended the event. The festivities were tied to Indonesia’s indepen-dence day. A giant feast was prepared for the Kids’ Guernica family on the first night, and we participated in speeches and entertainment the second night on the city’s municipal soccer field. Entertainment included a children’s gamelan orchestra and Balinese Legong dancing followed by traditional Japa-nese music and dance.

Some of us from the Guernica Project were asked to give short speeches and we did that surrounded by the 30 or more murals that were hung on bamboo frames all around the football field, for all the celebrants to see. The Rajah’s family supported the Guernica celebration, and several of the Rajah’s grand-sons, including Tjokorda Krishna Sudharsana, took part in the festivities. The organizers presented a symposium and workshops dealing with children and peace. For example, Mary Beth McBride explained energy centers in the body and how peace is to be found within, and Gabriel Felder talked about the Peace Waves initiative in Europe and an upcoming harmony in diversity con-ference to coincide with the European para-Olympics.

The richest experience in Bali was the children’s mural painting workshop itself. Some third-grade children from the elementary school, coincidental-ly, had been working with a UNESCO initiative centered on peace and they became eager participants in the mural painting process. Two murals were made: one printed, and one painted. The theme of the painted mural was A Gift of Peace, revisited, taking its direction from the first mural painted in Tal-lahassee. Toshifumi Abe, a founder of Kids’ Guernica, was down on his knees at child level, working with the children all day.

Other international committee members took turns working with the children. One of the adult participants, Miwa Kogetsu from Japan, told me that, in her mind, Kids’ Guernica is holistic education driven by internal motivations, un-like the facts-based, head-based teaching and learning that happens in most schools in Japan. I agreed that was also the case in the United States. She declared that she intended to teach in the holistic way modeled by this project when she returned and culminate a curriculum unit with a new Kids’ Guer-nica mural. This is an example of the sort of human connection that is made through the project, where people of different cultures can come together and discuss ideas that really count. What really mattered in that gathering was not the murals (some really good and some not so good), but the fact that 150 people from Japan and 50 others from all parts of the world came together with the people of Bali for a common cause bigger than a personal or narrow cultural agenda.

When the exhibition was over, I presented the first mural, done in Tallahas-see, to the Museum Puri Lukisan, which became its permanent home. I also presented the Tennessee mural, coordinated by Debra Sickler-Voigt, to the curator, who is also a grandson of the Rajah. Finally, significant for this cur-rent exhibition, was the international committee’s last supper. At that event we figured out between us that the project had grown to more than 150 mu-rals. Also at that supper, Takuya suggested that maybe we should have the 15-year celebration in Florida. I agreed on the spot to try to arrange that.

The Third Five Years New Blood

Asit Poddar recounts that, in Ubud, “I met a young girl, Maya, from Greece, with Mr. Thomas Economacos.” The young girl was Hatto Fischer’s daughter and that was Kids’ Guernica’s introduction to Hatto. A prime mover for Kids’ Guernica in recent years, Hatto first became involved in January 2005, when

[Top] The Japanese mural Precious Life on exhibition in 2005 in Ubud, Bali. [Above left] Balinese dancers performing at the Kids’ Guernica tenth anniversary gathering in Ubud, Bali. [Above right and near right] Talented participants who demonstrated native dance forms at the Kastelli exhibition in Crete in 2006.


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his organization, Poiein Kai Prattein, joined Peace Waves in Torino, Italy, in a Youth Peace Camp to help prepare for the Winter Olympics in 2006. The aim was to ensure the Olympic truce in conjunction with upholding human rights. Hatto had organized poets and the Olympic Truce under the theme Poetry Connections for the Olympic Games in Athens in 2004. “Part of that,” he says, “reflected my collaboration with Poets Against the War and Sam Hamill in Seattle, Washington, USA. It was a response to 9/11, the Middle East and the war that had started in Iraq. When I was in Torino,” he continued, “there was a group of youth painting a peace mural. Peace Waves was then in con-tact with [International Committee Member] Gabriele Felder. They had invited youth from all over the world. Among them were two from Afghanistan and Jad Salman from Palestine who I have now adopted, symbolically, and who is now studying art in Paris.”

Hatto continued, “Once I got interested in Kids’ Guernica after the Torino ex-perience, I learned that the International Committee with Takuya Kaneda as coordinator was planning to organize an international festival in Ubud, Bali. I decided then to make a contribution. Together with Thomas Economacos, we undertook the task of finding the right materials and paints along with a place where the children could paint a peace mural. The outcome was the peace mural of Poiein Kai Prattein called The War Is Over. When Thomas Economa-cos and my daughter Maya came back, they conveyed the strong message that everyone would love to see some Kids’ Guernica activity in Greece.”

The rest is history: Kastelli, Crete, around Greek Easter time in 2006, the Chios event in 2007, and the current exhibition, which Hatto has helped to curate, among many other Kids’ Guernica activities. Meanwhile, elsewhere, the project was still expanding, from mouth to mouth, person to person.

Haifa

For example, when three students, Christina, Joe, and Thayer, did a peace project in a summer camp in Haifa, Israel, during summer 2008, the proj-ect brought everyone together and allowed especially the youth to express themselves in a most critical but creative way. The target group there were Palestinian children whose Arabic parents hold Israeli citizenship. Naturally, overcoming the notion of enemy was most challenging aspect of the proj-ect. The students are linked to Iman Mourad’s daughter Maysa who studied with the three in the United States and who suggested as a peace project they should take into consideration Kids’ Guernica. Maysa could not go along since she had no visa to enter Israel. Reports Christina Goosman, “As it can be seen on the four last pictures that show the end product, there are two peace doves on the upper left corner with a sun that says peace. Under it, one can see the Wall, which is built around Palestine by the Israeli government. In front of the Wall stands Handala, a cartoon figure by Palestinian cartoonist Naji Al-Ali who created cartoons that depict the complexities of the plight of Palestinian refugees from approximately 1975 through 1987, when he was assassinated as he walked towards the offices of Al-Qabas newspaper. He died in the hospital on August 29th.

Baltimore, Maryland, USA, Coordinated by Bikrant Man Shrestha

On Saturday, November 8, 2008, students at the Shady Grove Middle School, Baltimore, Maryland, USA, participated in the Kids’ Guernica exhibition held at the seventeenth annual meeting of Nepa Pasa Pucha Amerikaye (NPPA) and Sirjana Contemporary Art Gallery. This celebration corresponded with Nepal’s Sambat (Bhintuna), Nepal’s New Year.

The main co-coordinator of the Kids’ Guernica exhibition was Bikrant Man Shrestha. He was assisted by Bishal Man Shrestha, Sushan Manandhar, and Meenu Shrestha. The theme for Kids’ Guernica was created by Nadim Maha-rjan: “Let’s begin the peace of art and an art of peace will begin with you.”

[Top] Toshifumi Abe in discussion with children in Bali. [Left and above right] A detail of the Haifa mural in 2008 and some of the children artists from Israel.


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Twenty-one children from Shady Grove Middle School and other schools dem-onstrated their outstanding talents on the 3.5m x 7.8m canvas. The creation of the Kids’ Guernica artwork began at 2:00 pm and ended at approximately 10:00 pm. In creating this artwork, the students drew individual pictures that depicted the theme, “peace,” which was then collated into one work that was displayed.

The description of the project states that in developing the first draft of the artwork, the children, ages 4 to 17 years, were allowed to draw their inter-pretation of “peace” on smaller sheets of paper using contemporary colors and adding their individual creativity. Each child expressed his or her artistic passion by either crunching or spraying paint all over a canvas. Some of these artistic expressions were representative of Nepalese culture, which was im-pressive, since these children, though outside of Nepal, through their artistic expression showed their connection with their mother country. At the end of the day, it turned out to be a successful exhibition and the children were very pleased to see their artwork on display.

The Current Exhibition The Second Tallahassee Mural

The second Tallahassee peace mural was designed and executed by teachers and children in the school system of Leon County, coordinated by Florida State University Museum of Fine Arts Education Curator, Viki Thompson Wylder.

Fourteen teachers in 14 schools signed up for participation. Their students collaboratively designed and painted their own sections of the mural-sized canvas. Managed by Education Program interns and volunteers (overseen first by Hannah Dahm and then by Alison Schaeffler-Murphy), the canvas trav-eled from school to school. Sections were blocked in a quilt-like fashion. A quilt-like composition for this mural served several functions. It facilitated the involvement of various schools, teachers, and children, and the quilt is a dis-tinctly American form, an appropriate structural configuration within which to portray American children’s thoughts on the encouragement of peace within the world.

The quilt mural includes a center section of 14 large blocks and two outer border sections. Each of the central sections was designed by each school/teacher/class using Edward Hicks’ Peaceable Kingdom as a basis for the painted design. These sections reflect the North Florida environment, its flora, fauna, and people. Of the two outer border sections, one shows children hold-ing hands. Leon County students painted these children as a reflection of the diversity of students within their schools. The second outer border repeats a series of traditional American quilt block designs. These block patterns were selected by teachers as a visual communication of events in America’s past. For example, the Slave Chain block pattern was selected because this pattern was utilized on quilts that were hung along the Underground Railroad prior to the Civil War. The pattern indicated that this was a place where escaped slaves could remove their broken manacles. Seminole piecing patterns were included as a communication about Florida’s history.

At this writing, it is expected that this Tallahassee mural will serve as stimula-tion for further activities. For example, other Leon County elementary schools will be invited to create artwork based on the concept of peace to show in a parallel Student Display. All media, style, and form will be encouraged. Indi-vidual and group projects will be accepted. The participation of additional teachers and approximately 300 to 400 students is expected. A teacher work-shop will be offered on the Friday evening before the Saturday reception for the Kids’ Guernica exhibition. An educator from outside the United States will talk about the Kids’ Guernica project as it has unfolded in Europe and other locations around the globe. Suggestions for classroom activities based on the concept of peace will be provided. During the Saturday reception, a workshop

[Pages 18 and 19] Images from the creation of the 2009 Tallahassee mural, including uni-versity student volunteers who instructed par-ticipants in the American quilt as an art form with the Underground Railroad (Civil War era) Slave Chain pattern and indigenous Florida patterns like the piecework of the Seminole Indians.


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will be held to give visitors to the Museum the opportunity to work on a new 2010 peace mural. This workshop will be coordinated by Wafa Elsaka, art teacher at Hartsfield Elementary School. Ms. Elsaka, an immigrant and re-cent citizen, carries a special interest in this project and its aims. It is hoped that a city location can be found for the mural’s presentation. On the day of the reception, visiting families will find a series of “make and take” tables throughout the museum. These tables will be stocked with art supplies and staffed by volunteers who will assist children with the making of art pieces to take home. Finally, elementary students will perform at the reception. These performances, emphasizing peace, may include music—vocal and instrumen-tal—as well as potential poetry recitations, dance, dramatic skits, and so on.

A teachers’ exhibition packet, which includes information on the project as well as lesson plans, was completed and distributed before the exhibition. Every art teacher in the county, and some art teachers outside the county, received one.

The Higashikurume, Japan, Mural: Life Is as Sweet and Short as the Cherry Blossoms

In 1997, Kazuko Hosoda, an art teacher of elementary school in Whiggish Chrome, Tokyo, told her fifth grade students about Kids’ Guernica project and they started making wood cut prints to express their wish for peace. Even after they finished elementary school, some of them gathered on Sundays to continue under the art teacher’s guidance and a Guernica-sized wood cut print of peace image was finally completed in 1999, called Life is as Sweet and Short as the Cherry Blossoms. The peace image was printed on a huge rice paper and the unique artwork was exhibited in the Kids’ Guernica inter-national exhibition in Kathmandu, Nepal, in 2000. The students kept their keen interests in world peace even after they became high school students. In 2003, the student group organized a peace event with their wood cut work at Whiggish Chrome City Community Center. During the exhibition, they also organized a workshop to create a new Kids’ Guernica with 200 visitors to the venue. From a three-year old child to an eighty-six year old person, various people participated in this workshop. Each participant used a stencil tech-nique to print an image of a flower on huge rice paper. The whole image symbolizes that each flower is singing a song of peace in chorus.

The Chios/Izmir Greece, Mural: Bridges for Intercultural Understanding/The War is Over

When Poiein Kai Prattein and the local mayor organised an exhibition in Kas-telli, in 2006, in Crete, 45 persons came from abroad and 18 peace mu-rals were involved. The celebration included poet Katerina Anghelaki Rooke, Marcus from Chios, Socrates Kabouropoulos from EKEVI, the National Book Centre of Greece, Fatema Nawaz from Afghanistan, poet Dostana Laverge from Strasbourg and many others. The Kaneda family came from Japan along with Keiko. The poetic atmosphere and celebrations linked to Greek Easter were a highlight of the celebration. The workshops contained peace games for children, pantomime, and dance, while a special poetry reading of four famous poets on the theme of war took place both near the exhibition and in a neighbouring community centre. Since it coincided with Greek Easter, local traditions were shown to the participants and on the recommendation of the priest every one of the community went to see the exhibition as a guided tour after church service was over. Public funding was secured in Kastelli, with the mayor and local community providing food, accommodation and exhibition space in a school along with the materials needed for the exhibition while all Kids’ Guernica participants from abroad paid for their own transportation.

The same model was repeated in 2007, when Poiein Kai Prattein organized a Kids’ Guernica exhibition on the Greek island of Chios. Asit took a blind boys’ peace mural from Calcutta and Iman Nouri brought one from Lebanon. From


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Bombay Banibrata Poddar also sent one Kids’ Guernica peace mural and Professor Mizuguchi joined the group to photographically capture the events. Hatto commented that: “The inherent dynamic of Kids’ Guernica is that it surprises everyone. Out of a simple action, created by one art teacher or co-ordinator and a few children, a public square can suddenly come alive and more and more people create a community of understanding. Unforgettable for me was the time we spent in Chios when Takuya came with 30 Japanese people, including ten of his students who were all skilled in interacting with children. They brought food from Japan and we cooked out on the platia. Those who benefited the most were the outcasts of Greek society on Chios: the immigrants and the foreign workers. In Europe we call that social inclu-sion. Everyone should have the right to have access to community. Thus the art of networking and organizing has to be perceived as letting things unfold and take on a more complex shape. The involvement of many different layers of society is what gives to every one of these actions its varied meanings.”

“Asit Poddar with his blind boys mural created much discussion in Chios,” stated Hatto. “He did it again at the ECCM Symposium with his video. Before Chios, he and I went around in Kastelli, he with a pencil, I with my pen and together drawings and texts created a way to see that local environment. It means artists become indicators for what goes on in a community. That is life. It is bursting at the seams especially when we know in art there is nothing out of control but seemingly we need to be modest in our assumptions as to what we can do alone and more so together.”

Hatto continued, “When we did the peace mural in Izmir, we were already pre-paring the ECCM Symposium Productivity of Culture and in conjunction with that another Kids’ Guernica exhibition at the Zappeion, Athens. For this many murals were prepared: Dubai, Martinique, Izmir-Chios, Australia, Georgia, and Athens 108 Elementary School. The connection to the ECCM, the Network of European Capitals of Culture, came about due to my long-standing collabora-tion with Spyros Mercouris, the brother of Melina Mercouri, the legendary cultural figure and Minister of Culture of Greece during the reign of the PASOK party under Andreas Papandreou.”

The following description of the Chios / Izmir project appears on the Kids’ Guernica website: The Chios, Greece, and Izmir, Turkey, events took place in 2007, coordinated by Deniz Hasirci, Thomas Economacos, Hatto Fischer, Effi Lipari. The original conception of the Chios project was Takuya Kaneda’s idea to model the mural after the famous painting, The Slaughter of Chios by Eugène Delacroix. Kaneda hoped that a painting by children of Turkey and Greece, which have been in conflict over Cyprus, would show that intercultural dialogue is possible, and he donated the canvas toward that end. The mural was painted as a result of a partnership between Poiein Kai Prattein and a buddy program established between The Izmir University of Economics and TAKEV Özel –lkö-retim Okulu. The workshop was originally organized by Poiein Kai Prattein to take place in May, but it was not possible to get the Turkish children to Chios at that time due to lack of funding and a tight schedule. In Chios, Thomas Economacos started with Greek children to make sketches and then, thanks to Irini Pitsaki, Hatto Fisher made contact with Deniz Ha-sirci (Izmir University of Economics, IEU) and Gulistan Banu Cel Sevgi (TAKEV School) and they started to communicate about doing a joint peace mural. One aspect of this collaboration came about from a buddy program estab-lished by Deniz Hasirci, in Turkey, during the 2007-2008 academic year. Older and younger students were paired and worked on specific projects designed to increase their creativity, self-confidence, and responsibility. Using this mod-el, a joint action was established between children from Chios and Izmir to paint the peace mural under the auspices of Kids’ Guernica. In September, as a guest of IEU and TAKEV, 18 people—Greek youths and their parents—along with Thomas Economacos and Hatto Fischer came over to join Hasirci, Sevgi, and the Turkish participants. The mural workshop was held on September 27 through September 29, 2007.

The rice paper, woodcut, and stencil print mural from Higashikurume, Japan, completed in 2003 and entitled Life is as Sweet and Short as the Cherry Blossoms.

The Chios/Izmir Mural completed in 2007 as a cooperative mural project of Greek and Turkish schoolchildren.


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Three age groups were involved in the peace mural, The War Is Over: 2 and 3 year-old children as well as those from 7 to 9, and a third group from 15 to 16 years of age. While the youngest children painted around the edges, the 7-9 year-old children painted dancing figures. The oldest painted a sad figure in the corner. The other children were startled and did not know what to do at first with such a sad figure. Then, they found the solution. They painted a figure floating down to that sad figure. In one hand that floating figure held a message that read, “the war is over.” “This suggests,” said Hatto, “that the children in this process not only have to attend to the war between countries, but they also must find solutions to their own potential conflicts through dis-cussion and cooperative action in painting and action in a temporal context, because each day brings new revelations. Children learn to trust the process: they can let go and continue to paint without really knowing how in the end the whole painting will look. The gratifying thing is that everyone collectively knows when a solution is found.”

The mural was first exhibited in Athens in conjunction with a symposium called Productivity of Culture, on October 18 and 19, 2007. The Symposium was organized by the Network of European Cultural Capital Cities with Spy-ros Mercouris as its honorary president. The place of the exhibition was the Zappion—Megaron. The relationship established through this joint action be-tween the participants is only a first step in fostering further research on social relations between youth of different age and nationalities. This part-nership has already proven very fruitful for all participants. As part of the fifteen-year celebration of Kids’ Guernica at the Florida State University Mu-seum of Fine Arts and in conjunction with a new partner, Wafa Elsaka and Hartsfield Elementary School, in Tallahassee, the next step is to transform two-dimensional (painted) notions into the third dimension. That is, the par-ticipants, coordinated by Deniz Hasirci, will construct a Peace Village through a workshop with elementary school children, in which they will explore their notions of peace.

The Tripoli, Lebanon Mural: Enough! We Want to Live

This mural, entitled, Enough! We Want to Live, was painted for initial display in Tripoli, Lebanon, in April 2007, and in Chios, Greece, in May 2007. Iman Mourad coordinated the mural painting workshop in Tripoli, Lebanon. Says Iman, “the time pressure was great…and we had to overcome many obstacles to persevere, but at the core of my heart were the words of Gandhi [inspir-ing me] when he said, ‘real education consists in drawing the best out of yourself.’” She continued, “During the horrible June wars of 2006, my two daughters and I couldn’t go out, so we started painting our feelings and ex-pressions of being trapped at home on our bedroom walls. Beyond our walls I realized all Lebanese children and youth are the survivors of a horrible war; in their hearts and minds are the memories of all people who suffered and are still suffering until now from war in the world. After the war, I was a busy mother who worked in Beirut. That meant commuting five hours a day due to broken bridges and other obstacles resulting from the war. It was at this time I was asked to coordinate a peace mural by Poiein Kai Prattein, represented by Hatto Fischer, on canvas supplied by Takuya Kaneda of Japan, and I felt the urge to connect.”

“I was well supported,” continued Iman, “by Mrs. Houda Namle and Dr. Rami Finge, president and member of the Rotary Club Tripoli EL-Maarad. At the board meeting of Rotari Maarad the decision was taken immediately to in-struct Mrs. May Mounla Chmaytaly to provide us with all the tools, paints, videotapes, and to help with regard to all the publicity needed. The decision as to which schools and children were to be included was difficult due to time pressure, but in the end students from the Universal School of Lebanon (USL Koura), Antonin Int’l school (El mina), Rawdat EL Fayhaa school (Tripoli), French Lycee (Koura), Lebanese University (Kobbe) and the Children Care Association (Tripoli Municipality) participated.” Four art educators gave their

[Above] Murals on exhibition in Crete in 2006. [Below] The Chios/Izmir Mural completed in 2007 as a cooperative mural project of Greek and Turkish schoolchildren.


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time to help with a preliminary workshop. Following the advice of Mr. Thomas Economacos the children tried to feel peace within themselves. They imag-ined peace and afterwards sketched their first draft on paper.”

“Later on we all gathered to assess themes, colors and measurement of the scripts,” said Iman. “Windy weather conditions forced us to move from the book fair exhibition where the painting took birth to Antonin International School’s playground with permission from Priest Gabi Assaf. The calmer, cleaner and more peaceful surroundings of the school made it easier for the children to work with their creative insights. The peaceful atmosphere in con-trast to the difficulties in working outside made all of us all the more aware what are some of the obstacles to peace, which was expressed in the mural painting. The resolution to conflicts as painted onto the canvas was much easier than the politicians’ process of flying off to Qatar for talks. The simple reason is that children are truthful and innocent. They are blessed with an innate human quality: dignity. We adults should preserve this attribute and nourish it to provide an ideal community. [We need to make] peace within ourselves first, but as well we need peace in our country, peace with our neighbors, and more so, a peaceful healthy environment and a peaceful soci-ety in which our kids can grow up by integrating themselves in a responsible way to secure their lives…. It is a matter of retaining an open dialogue with others in order to bring about progressive changes towards a better, indeed just society.”

“The entire painting was conceived by the eyes and hands of our children. The expressive symbol at the middle with the divided girl (Dead and Alive girl) drawn by my daughter, Miriam, and her friend Ryan Moukaddem (USL students) naturally divided the painting into two themes: peace and war. On one full long day called by Mrs. Therese Le Cid ‘The harmony day’ the children painted and sang for 10 consecutive hours. They felt a responsibility to the peace mural despite final exams being close at hand,” said Iman.

The first appearance of Enough! We Want to Live was at a book fair exhibition in Tripoli on April 29, 2007. For 72 hours the children kept a peace vigil and read their poems as inspired by the “divided girl.” In Chios, people listened to Lebanese songs sung by children while Iman Mourad spoke to the pub-lic gathered in the square where the Kids’ Guernica exhibition of 18 peace murals was held. Iman’s daughter, Miriam, read her poems and engaged in discussion with representatives from Japan, Greece and the USA. Chios meant as well, visits to schools and writing together with others all kinds of peace messages, including the Arabic word for peace done on a wall and on a banner. Ongoing efforts include the start of a new peace mural for summer in 2009. That will take place during the implementation of a peace project in Tripoli under the title: Empowerment through Integration. It will be initiated by Maysa Mourad and her visually-impaired friend Sara Minkara. Both are students at Wellesley College in the USA. The mural is to be called Together! Let’s See and Live in Peace!

The Nagasaki, Japan Mural: Rebuilding the City After the Bomb

Young people at Seihi Junior High School executed the Nagasaki mural. The main image is taken from the Nagasaki Peace Memorial. The right hand is pointing to the bomb in the sky, which was dropped on Nagasaki 62 years before this mural was painted. More than 70,000 people died in that attack, and some still feel the pain now. Many people gather in this square, still to protest nuclear armaments and testing.

“We drew 2 churches,” said coordinator Toshifumi Abe, “and the Holy Mother.” This references the fact that 400 years ago, most of the people of Nagasaki were Christian. But Christianity was forbidden at the time of the Shimabara civil war. Although most people converted to Buddhism, some Christians held out against the persecution. Today there are many monuments to Christian

[Clockwise from top right] Asit Poddar; Takuya Kaneda and Thomas Economacos; Asit Poddar and Fatema Nawas; Deniz Hasirci. [Below] The 2007 mural from Tripoli, Lebanon, entitled Enough! We want to Live.


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martyrdom in Nagasaki; there are 26 so-called saints among the martyrs. The church rendered on the right is called the O-ura church that memorializes them. On the left side is the Urakami church that was destroyed by the atomic bomb but later reconstructed. Behind the statue of Buddha, there are some secret Christian symbols.

The dragon dance depicted in the mural, was introduced from China and is performed during the famous Nagasaki Okunchi festival. The trade boat conveying clover represents the age of national isolation. Also there is kite play called Hataage in Nagasaki in which origami cranes are folded to pray for peace. Nagasaki’s port is just like the form of the crane. So sometimes it is called the crane port. “Finally we rendered the Sakura,” said Abe, “as a symbol of Japan.”

The Chicago Mural: People of One World

Reports coordinator Stacy Koumbis, “The second Chicago Kid’s Guernica mu-ral (2006) brought together students from two suburban Greek-America ele-mentary schools, the Plato Academy and the Hellenic American Academy. We met at the Hellenic American Academy and produced one canvas collabora-tively. A curriculum was developed by teachers and administrators from both schools to complement the mural production. Before the painting of the mural actually began, we had an informal dialogue with the participating students about what they learned. This mural was developed at the Chicago Children’s Museum. To start off the painting action, educators were asked to engage their students in dialogue about the subject of International Borders, so that they become more aware of world events, and how borders impacts our daily lives. The culmination of this lesson brought together students from different schools throughout the Chicagoland area. They all participated in making of an oversized mural at the Chicago Children’s Museum on April 24, 2006.

Step 1 – For the dialogue students were asked the following questions: Why are borders important? What do you know about borders? What would hap-pen to the world if countries didn’t have borders? What happens to borders when there is a war? What happens to people who need to leave their homes because of war? What is a refugee? Which countries border the United States? Why do people who live in these countries leave their homes to come to a new country? What are the obstacles they need to overcome?Step 2 – Students were asked to make a journal in one of the following voices: someone hosting a family who has left their home because of war, a border guard, a refugee who needs to find a new place to live.Step 3 – Students visualized and created pictures related to borders.Step 4 – They painted together at the Chicago Children’s Museum. The paint-ing was first exhibited in Chios, Greece, in May 2006. Facilitators included: Marianthi Koritsaris, Principal, Plato Academy; Angie Maglaris, Principal, Hel-lenic American Academy; and Katie Svaicer, Art Instructor.

The Martinique Mural: Breaking the ChainsSavina Tarsitano’s Story

“Creativity in Motion was the theme for the Martinique workshop and mural, which took place in 2006 and 2007 with adolescents and children of Saint-Jacques Area,” reports coordinator Savina Tarsitano. “The activities were sup-ported by the Odyssey program and the Caribbean Art and Culture Centre Domaine de Fonds Saint-Jacques.”

She continues, “Creativity in Motion began in 2005 in Southern Italy, in the village Soveria Mannelli where the community painted a wall mural. In 2006, during my artistic residency at the Caribbean art centre, Domaine de Fonds Saint-Jacques, funded by the Odyssey program set up by the ACCR and financed by the French Ministry for Culture and Communication, I worked with adolescents and children of the Saint-Jacques area called Martinique.

[Above and right] Detail of the mural from Tripoli and placard from Lebanon. [Below] The Nagasaki peace mural completed by the stu-dents of Seihi Junior High School as a memorial of the fiftieth anniver-sary of the detonation of the atomic bomb in their city.


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Thanks to the support of director Yvette Galot, I could use the art centre as a workspace. The aim was to integrate this part of the population into the community through giving them the opportunity to use their imaginations to express their own ideas.”

“I worked with 25 adolescents and children between the ages 6 and 22; a local artist assisted me. These children used to play football in a space given to them by Fonds Saint-Jacques but they never participated actively in the center’s activities. These children and adolescents live in a poor area close to this wonderful architecture where the art centre is. It is an old rum distillery where slaves used to work. Around it can still be found the cemetery and the houses for the slaves. This place is rich in history but contains equally hard and unforgettable memory in which elements of identity and freedom were and are still very strong.

“One part of this district is considered unfortunately bad and dangerous due to the presence of a gang of young people called Baghdad. Violence is a way for them to communicate when no other language is known. A majority of them drink, smoke cannabis and sell it. The family structure is almost com-pletely absent. At the age of 10, or even younger, many are already left on their own to get to know the luck of love, hopes, and the cruelty of the world. The gang has replaced young people’s absent family. It gives them strength and identity. They feel protected, especially the young girls. The adolescents who are not members are afraid of the gang, even when they share the same space, playing football.

“In the beginning it was difficult for me to communicate with them. As I was an artist-in-residence working on an exhibition, I continued to work while wait-ing for a signal from them. They spent more than two weeks in observing me before they accepted to work with me. I was considered a white woman, in a way an enemy, but also because I was a foreign artist, they did not know if they could trust me.

“We organized two ateliers for them: sculpture and painting. A few of the group attended the ateliers and day-by-day the number increased. At the be-ginning silence was our common language. They observed me and listened to my advice. Because a local artist assisted me, it became easier to communi-cate and to understand them. In the end they worked very hard, staying with me all the time. They made some very impressive paintings and sculptures full of creativity and fantasy. I observed them during three weeks until I was accepted into their culture as a white friend. I decided to involve them in my exhibition. I organized different spaces each separated from the other so as to respect the unique creativity of every one. I showed them how to use space and how to install an exhibition. They were very happy and proud to have their own space. It meant a lot to them to have a role in the community and to be appreciated for their work rather than be judged negatively. They felt legiti-macy to be there. They were so enthusiastic about the cultural event since before that [time], they had never worked together with an artist or had been involved in an exhibition.

“This story is important for understanding my work with them this year when we realized the canvas for Kids’ Guernica. Again thanks to the director of the centre, we started organizing in order to continue the project in 2007. I was again in residency thanks to the Odyssey Programme during that summer. The children and adolescents were surprised and happy at the same time to see me back again. I had kept my promise to come back and to work with them again. I had to learn to control my emotions and fears, as a fact, in order to be able to work with them. At the same time, it gave me the opportunity to learn a lot. It was an equal exchange. That is the secret of any alliance.

“When I proposed to them to participate in the exhibition Kids’ Guernica by realizing together a big canvas, they became afraid due to the importance of

Images of the mural developed at the Chicago Children’s Museum in 2006.


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the event. They felt it was too big for them. Yet they accepted and we started. At the beginning I worked only with 4 young boys. After one week my atelier was full with 20 people, and the big surprise: the so-called bad boys of the Baghdad gang were also there. They provoked and joked, if only as a way to test me, as they told me later, when they said: ‘We have chosen you, you didn’t choose us.’ I was really surprised and asked them to tell me why they chose me. Their answer was simple: ‘You treat us as normal persons, you were curious about our stories, above all let us express our ideas without judging or influencing us. You believe in us and in our capacities. You gave us a possibility to be a part of a project and to show our abilities and imagination to others. You were tolerant but at the same time firm when it came to observ-ing rules and to show respect for the work, the space. You have understood us. We did make some stupid jokes, maybe, but you know as well that we are responsible and when necessary we work hard.’

“The boys worked at home for some days, and then one of them came with an idea of representing peace with two hands shaking each other. One white arm, the other a black one to show the tolerance between people, the end of injustice. The arms should be at the centre of the canvas. Long chains were around the wrists and had to be broken as a sign of freedom and hope for a better world. Around the arms would be the universe with all the five continents to mean peace, friendship and tolerance throughout the world. Outside of the universe is joy and friendship represented by different colors to match different civilizations. They are illustrated with four small squares all, inside the hands: white and black, to recall the main drawing, the mes-sage of peace.

“There is the exception of three squares. They are different. One of them signifies their own area called Baghdad City. The drawings are full of symbol-ism from the culture of their ancestors; at the same time, it underlines their own identity and needs to be understood and not judged only because they were born and live there. As they told me: ‘We want to live in peace and want to be left alone. We are always guilty even if we are innocent.’ The most inter-esting aspect of the painting for me was that they wanted to tell as well the story of their community and of the art centre. One of the final two squares represents the river, the sea, the skin and the birds, while the other is a tomb of Père Labate who came to Martinique, at Fonds Saint-Jacques to educate the people and convert them to Christianity, try to give them freedom from slavery.

“The oldest youth said to me: ‘This is our earth and where we live with our past. Those seeing our paintings can then have a better idea about us. More-over slaves lived and died here, and they represent peace and injustice.’ He was so happy that I let him paint all of this, in trusting him, even when he wrote ‘Baghdad City.’ It is a way, in my opinion, for them to denounce their conditions as a message of change of their situations.

Everything in the mural has been justified by their vision of life. Some ex-amples are1. They selected the color ‘chocolate’, not black, to paint one hand. I

asked why? They replied: ‘we are not African, Savina. Look at our skin, we are different.’

2. The position of the five continents with Europe close to the chains and Africa far away from them. They told me that Africa had suffered a lot under slavery. Give it a new position. A way to freedom and hope.

3. The color of the chain is red. The color of their suffering is the color of blood but also victory when fighting against injustices.

4. The hands in the circle and around the universe symbolize the need for justice and peace.

5. The colors white and black of the hands underline the fact that the fight has always been between white and black people. I tried to tell them to use different colors to denote their cultures. Their answer was clear:

Two views of the mural from Martinique.


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impossible due to the injustices between white and black, with Africans the slaves.

6. The importance of illustrating an old construction on the river and the sea meant all these symbols are important in Martinique for they are also a window to the world.

7. They decided to put as a frame their ‘local tissue madras.’ I asked them why. The answer was again very simple: ‘We want the others to get to know our traditions.’ In fact, they chose the traditional colors and not those that reflect new influences. Everything has to be original when it comes to respecting reality. This was really important to them.

Difficulties were:1. The presence of the ‘bad boys’ was important but also excluded other

adolescents who didn’t want to work with them.2. Fairness: less discipline than last year, more chaotic this time around.3. The difficulties, almost, at the beginning, were how to talk with young

girls. They needed lots of time before they could trust me. But after that they were always close to me, working hard and telling me their stories.

4. To leave them, with the feeling that you can go back to your own home, while they continue leading a hard life.

5. In their eyes you could read the question, but what is going to happen in future? Will there be another possibility to work together?

Social Impact included:1. To relate to adults and to involve them as well in the project.2. To demonstrate the force of art as a tool of communication.3. To underline the importance of creativity when it comes to express emotions, feelings.4. To link an art centre with the community.5. To emphasize the role of the artist in society.6. To create a bridge between art and local communities.7. To educate by sharing experiences and knowledge.

“In the end, art cannot be separated from the community. Culture, heritage, and history feed into the memory and imagination of people. Art comes from our reality and experiences. Communication is imperative to spread this kind of project. Cooperation is essential for an art centre: it is a way to open the doors to a different public, to spread its vision and message. An art centre is a place of meeting, a link between the community and the artists. It is crucial, nowadays, to have these two dimensions always in mind.

“I truly believe in the importance of this artistic project for different reasons. Thanks to the artistic language we are able to open hearts, to enter different worlds. To be part of a project means to work together, to help each other, to be tolerant, to cooperate, to exchange. We exchanged our opinions, ideas without the one or the other being superior but persons with the same aim: to complete the canvas.

“We have to give more space to young people like them to express them-selves. I needed to push them to express their opinions in front of a public. That was very hard since they were not used to talk and be listened to. They need us, as artists to help them develop the capacity to see what the others are unable to see. They, we, all need therefore more cultural associations, networks, managers and so on, all with the aim to express oneself and to be listened to. We cannot change the world or their lives or destinies, but we can try to do our best to help them. We are only at the beginning of a big project.”

Belfast, Northern Ireland: Bernard L. Conlan’s Story

“The Belfast Kids’ Guernica painting originates in a city where wall murals are

[Above] The 2002 Indian mural from Ghanshyamdas Saraf Girls’ College in Mumbai. [Below] American mural from the state of Tennessee.


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the city’s calling card,” reports Bernard Conlan. “The Belfast Kids’ Guernica differs from immovable murals in that, like all Kids’ Guernica paintings, it is portable and promotes peace. Nonetheless, it is obviously influenced by, and hopefully, will influence the mural tradition of its native city.”

“The painting came about when Kids’ Guernica organizer, Hatto Fischer of Poiein Kai Prattein suggested that a painting from Belfast, with its turbulent history and wall mural tradition, would be a valuable addition to the Kids’ Guernica collection. So began a saga with traits of odyssey, which saw me frantically canvass and consult community, arts and other organizations. An invitation to Athens in October 2007 proved crucial to this project. The people and the paintings in Athens inspired me to get a Belfast Kids’ Guernica in the can.

“After Athens, a short-term contract brought me into contact with local schools. I met a seasoned art teacher, a Picasso fan. So began a creative and convoluted dialogue with Cathal Cauldwell, who, as well as teaching, is an artist in his own right. Contact with various schools from all over Belfast was established, to ensure that every section of Belfast’s divided community would be represented and have an equal opportunity to participate. A tense meeting was held with teachers. Meeting Cathal for a few pints after this stressful conclave ensured the triumph of creativity. He proclaimed that his school would, if his principal, Mary Collins agreed, run with the project. After almost a year of intense campaigning and consultation, one teacher in one school saw the big picture and took action.

“The next time I spoke to Cathal, he had a class of 14 year-old girls from the Little Flower Secondary School in North Belfast primed to paint. The can-vass was sent to Belfast from Kyoto in Japan, via Athens. I talked to the girls about Kids’ Guernica and discussed war, peace, identity, solidarity and other themes with them. Thomas Economacos of Poiein Kai Prattein visited Belfast to provide facilitation support. He ensured that Cathal and his young artists felt part of an organic, worldwide movement. From there the painting hap-pened as if by magic.

“At the end of June 2008, I was summoned to the school assembly hall and there covering a huge section of floor was a spectacular painting. I instinctive-ly characterized it as the Color of Optimism. It radiated immense energy and a wholly positive message. Cathal and his colleague Noreen Friel explained that the artists discussed their experience of peace and conflict in a Belfast con-text and a wide range of concerns, which affect young people today such as drugs, knife culture, racism and their hopes for the future. They then created individual images that described and/or symbolized the issues they identified before a group session finally decided on the painting’s composition.

“As to the painting’s symbolism, it was explained that the eye is a symbol of ‘how we see the world in our own individual ways and the fish expresses how Christians take different paths of belief.’ A ‘rising sun of hope and a Picasso dove of peace’ are also included. Crucially, the painting through the use of flags and other tangible symbols represents Belfast’s two main identities equally: Britishness and Irishness. Recent emigrant groups from Eastern Eu-rope and elsewhere are also represented with ideas supplied from the Little Flower School Year 10 art class as a whole. In Belfast seven girls had the courage to paint a peace mural. It inspired me to write the following poem:

Color of OptimismA blank canvass came from Japan via Athens,As if by magic odyssey,Blankness converted into the color of optimism -And power of Herculean possibility,Derived from random children afterI canvassed widely, in Belfast,

[Above top] One of three murals created by Japanese junior high school students. [Above] Murals on display and the cultural event in Yamanashi Prefecture in Ja-pan. [Right and below] Bernard Conlan and the mural from Belfast, Ireland.


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A solitary, seasoned teacher led a group of girlsWith novice minds and aspiration, to see“The big picture” - to weave a tangible uniquenessThat will outlive us, mortally.

Athens, Greece, Mural: Peace through Abstraction

In 2007, Thomas Economacos and Takuya Kaneda coordinated a mural workshop with 40 children from Elementary School 108 in Athens, Greece, in conjunction with the Productivity of Culture conference. A first design of the peace mural was produced after children had made sketches on their own, at home or while in class, as to what made up their world. They were then asked to “clean up” their sketches. This prompted a movement toward abstraction of which this single ball eventually became a symbol. Thomas said “Abstrac-tion means exactly to explain the unknown by something rational. It lets the imagination become a torch in the dark world. Putting light to things is like making discoveries. What it requires is a frame, some reference. There has to exist above all a trust to go forward even when there is no greater certainty than the trust to let the pencil speak by itself. The latter requires letting go. In this process of abstraction a single ball became the symbol of such abstrac-tion. From there the children returned with a new concept of the complex world they face daily, but now with something calm and peaceful in mind.”

The Kabul, Afghanistan Mural: Never Again War

Fatema Nawaz coordinated the Kabul mural workshop in 2006. Pupils of a school in Kabul, Afghanistan, created the painting. Many girls and boys be-tween the ages of 8 and 14 participated in the collaborative process of mak-ing the mural. Fatema Nawaz said she started the painting at first with a very small group outside of ordinary teaching hours. But every time when they met other new children joined. Because eventually there were so many children who wanted to participate, they had to stand in line to paint, Fatema did not send them away, and these children waited patiently until it was their turn. In the end there were so many children interested that she had to close the art room from inside, so that work on the painting could continue.

This wish to paint is closely linked with the recent history of the country. Due to war many children did not attend any school. Neither has art a part of their daily lives. Fatema reports that only slowly does art find now its place in the everyday life of the children and of the inhabitants of the people of Afghani-stan. In that context the children who painted Never Again War very much ap-preciated working on such a huge surface. Not only the form of the painting, but also the theme was very stimulating to the children who had all experi-enced both war and peace despite their young ages. Their visions of war and peace are therefore concrete, the result of lived through experiences, past and present. Their abstract paintings were translations of real experience.

According to Hatto Fischer, the mural, Never Again War, is divided into two parts. On the left side the sky is grey, houses are destroyed, [and] one sees tanks and airplanes, that are death machines but there are no human be-ings. Danger looms over everyone, in the air and on the ground. On the other side of the painting, peace means by contrast, that one can go to school, that in nature everything blooms, that one sees human beings and they treat each other in peace and with respect. That part of the painting with weap-ons being destroyed by a meat grinder reminds Hatto of Janusz Korczak who wrote about a weapon factory being transformed by children into a chocolate producing plant. He stated, “Such a utopian wish can also be detected in the Kabul painting with weapons being put into a meat grinder with things children need at school coming out at the other end. It is a simple message: don’t spend money on weapons but on education. Instruments of peace are pencils, books and paper to write on. To deprive children of a proper educa-tion is like robbing them of chances not only to survive, but also to make any

Views of preliminary studies and the mural Peace through Abstraction painted in Athens in 2007.


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positive contribution to society. [The only thing] children can do when war de-stroys their homes is become onlookers. They can see the difference as well: a peaceful landscape compared to what is happening at home. That creates strong wishes for another world.”

Unfortunately at the time of this writing, “the actuality of the motif has not changed,” according to Hatto. “There are military confrontations still happen-ing in Afghanistan and suicide bombers threaten the lives of people. Never-theless, the situation of the children in Kabul can no longer be compared with the times of civil war. Despite all difficulties at least children can visit schools and the children live no longer in exile.”

The Dubai Mural: Life Hangs in a Balance

“Our message of peace,” reports coordinator, Sara Lowndes, of the Dubai British School comes from our students’ words as well as the mural. The chil-dren reported: “The whole experience has so far been a great team effort and we have, as a group worked together and discussed our ideas before we start-ed the painting. It has been a chance to learn about the devastating effects of war on the human race, particularity the innocent children that always seem to be the victims of war. The experience has opened our eyes to the number of conflicts that are being fought around the world today.” The mural was the effort of a number of students and teacher Wendy Harris.

The Kolkata, India Mural: Blind Boys’ Guernica

Reports coordinator Asit Poddar, “From the very beginning, that is since 1995 I have been involved in the Kids’ Guernica Project. Since then many Kids’ Guernica peace murals have been painted across the world. All of them ex-press unique views of peace about the future of the world and in particular what are the chances of peace. Many of them are even done by children with special needs in Japan, India, and other countries. In 2007 we celebrated in my country the centenary of the great blind artist Binod Bihari Mukherjee. He was not blind at birth but had poor vision and became only later in his life blind. Even though blind he continued with his work and painted many big murals with his inner eye.”

“That gives me the conviction that blind children could also make a Kids’ Guernica mural. I went to the Blind Boys’ Academy, Rama Krishna Mission in Narendrapur. It is located at the outskirts of the city. I spoke with the principal of the school and with the blind children. The children agreed to do a peace mural. During the three-day workshop in the hot summer towards the end of April 2007, they enjoyed doing the painting a lot. Naturally this workshop was different as the children who participated were blind. With the help of thread and gum they made it possible. I was a little hesitant but the boys were charged up and confident that they could do it. After discussion and planning, they took 4 days to finish the huge size painting in the middle of the hot sum-mer of kolkata in a beautiful location under the tree. They decided what they would paint but the medium had to be different than normal children; they used colored thread, glue, pastels and paper. The media are used in such a way that one blind person can understand what the other had drawn.

Asit Poddar was assisted by Sumita Samanta, Associate Coordinator; Samik Saha, Documentation; and Sujit Naskar, Instructor, with 19 students, ages 10-14.

According to Hatto Fischer, Asit Poddar is still working with blind children who are already doing their next mural based on the question of why there is so much brutality in the world. They wish to touch the other side by going through walls with their hands. This work has already altered the epistemological ba-sis of knowledge and thus as a point of reference shall alter in future the perception of the world.

[Above] Mural from Afghanistan. [Right] Dubai schoolchildren with their mural. [Below] the mural from Shanghai, China.


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The Unfinished Murals

Mural events planned or in progress at the time of this writing include a mural workshop coordinated by Boris Tissot and Jad Salman in the very same ate-lier where Picasso painted the original Guernica, called Faces of Peace, and another, which will also be included in this exhibition. Then, there is the exhi-bition coordinated by Gerald Schumann under the auspices of Théâtre de la Vallée in Ecouen, also in Paris, entitled Breaking the Chains of Slavery. Finally we expect a mural from Wollongong, Australia, coordinated by Ian Brown.

Conclusion

In the end, I believe art should address things that count in the personal and social lives of children and adults. The art experience should be about making and critically receiving art that says something of significance that contributes to the human story. By extension, community art and art educa-tion should be authentic and theme-based, recognizing works of art as both the windows and mirrors of our lives. Ultimately, it should serve as a bridge of respect and understanding between people toward the goal of a global sense of community. This is no easy thing. It will require sensitive analysis of social realities and hard work.

It is easy to draw platitudes, across cultures, such as the one that goes, “we are all alike under the skin.” But a close examination reveals we aren’t. Be-cause we have human culture and that varies, so do we. However, we are all people. And we do have, it appears, some universal impulses, like loyalty to the group and honesty and integrity, and the drive to make art. But these impulses take different forms in different circumstances and in different cul-tures, and that’s the rub. It’s the form that counts, after all. We take on the ability to engage in and understand symbolic communication by being em-bedded in a particular culture. Beyond substance, it is the manner in which something is presented that allows us access to the inner life of the other. Or keeps us out. Making and studying art as meaningful communication in a cultural context can help us understand this.

This, then, was the approach we used to develop and implement the interna-tional Kids’ Guernica peace mural project. The content and the strategies are real, are life-based, have real interest to, and have a real impact on the chil-dren and adults who participate. The vehicle—not the end, but the vehicle—is art. The goal is to build a bridge of peace and understanding, ultimately to save the world from further devastating warfare. Is it too grand to claim that the world can be saved through community action in art? Probably so. But let me reverse the question and ask if not through art, then what? Certainly biology and physics and agriculture and chemistry give us wonderful practi-cal tools, but it is the arts that provide the holistic quality of understanding necessary for social wholeness and cultural health, through the arts that we develop the sensibility, the unifying sense, the direction, in short the ability to use our tools. Let me repeat then, if the world cannot be saved through art, then through what? Through the Kids’ Guernica Peace Mural Project and initiatives like it, we want nothing less than to save the world through intercul-tural tolerance and understanding. One bridge at a time.

—T.A.

Tom Anderson, guest curator and author of the essay, is also co-organizer of the accompa-nying International Art and Design for Social Justice Conference. He holds the Jessie Lova-no-Kerr Professor chair in of Art Education at Florida State University. He joined joined the faculty in 1983 and was named Art Educator of the Year in 2004 by the United States Society for Education through Art and Higher Education Art Educator of the Year by the National Art Education Association in 2006. In 1995, he became a co-founder and later a member of the International Advisory Committee of the Kids’ Guernica Peace Mural Project. Building upon his dissertation and interest in community murals, the project has been responsible for perhaps as many as 250 murals, with international exhibitions, and peace workshops across the globe.

The blind boys of India and their mural in 2007.


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References and Links

In this account I have borrowed freely from my colleagues’ words. The source of my borrowings is exclusively from personal conversations or from email conversations unless otherwise noted.

http://productivityofculture.org/symposium/discussions/http://poieinkaiprattein.org/kids-guernica/http://tr.truveo.com/Kids-Guernicamov/id/36028836282407879 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yUEzEEqT92khttp://www.artforpeace.peacewaves.org/it/partners.htm http://www.kids-guernica.org/.

[Above left] The study for Breaking the Chains of Slavery, a mural in process in Paris in 2009. [Above right] Japanese teachers and students with one of their murals in Bali. [Below] Mural from Aus-tralia, 2005.

Cover: Detail of the Tallahassee 2009 Mural, a project of the chil-dren artists from fourteen area schools.

Florida State University

Museum of Fine Arts

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