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PREMIER: PORTLAND, OREGON
Coffee with Cardamom
Curated by Andrea (Ray) Boyle
–PRESS RELEASE–
Solo Exhibit: “Can You See Me Now? (Part One): Reflections on Palestine” by Sarah Farahat
Group Exhibit: “Mirrors: A Middle Eastern/ American Collaboration”
Artists: Farooq Hassan, Marwan Nahle, Becca Bernstein, Jim Lommasson, Amira Dughri,
Rolla Selbak, Sarah Farahat, Andrea Boyle, Baher Bhutti, and Beth Ann Short.PLACE II: Settlement Galleries @ Pioneer Square Mall
700 SW 5th Ave, 3rd Floor of Atrium Bldg.
July 16- August 14, 2011Opening Reception: July 16, 6:00- 9:00 pm
Gallery Hours: Thurs-Sun, Noon- 6:00 pm
Special Events: Doors at 6:30pm, Begin at 7:00 pmCoffee with Cardamom: Curator Andrea Boyle presents a collaborative project titled, “Mirrors,” with a spotlight solo exhibition of Sarah Farahatʼs, “Can You See Me Now? (Part 1): Reflections on Palestine”
“Mirrors,” is a collaborative art-as-process piece exploring relationships of identity, responsibility and community between Middle Eastern-born and American-born artists within the current global context of the political uprisings in the Middle East. Using art as the common language, these artists will explore their relationships with one another by participating in weekly art therapy sessions, current topic conversations, and creating a collaborative body of multi-media artwork. As a process piece, “Mirrors,” examines the importance of artists, inspirations, and ideologies coming together in a space of reflection; in that, only a portion of the show features completed collaboration pieces, the remainder of the show focuses on pieces in process, as the artistic dialogue and weekly meetings continue in the gallery space. The show is designed to invite the audience to participate as both observer and subject, reflecting on their own insights on identity, responsibility, and community in the larger global context.
“Can You See Me Now? (Part One): Reflections on Palestine” by Sarah Farahat is a RACC sponsored solo exhibition culminating two years of travel, art making, and organizing efforts. The show contains photographs taken in the West Bank and Jerusalem, an ongoing collaboration between the artist and her deceased grandfather, sculptural reflections on Gaza and organized weekly events featuring internationally known academics, artists, and activists. All events are free and open to the public. For a full calendar of events, please visit: http://sarahfarahat.wordpress.com/events
You can listen to Eva Lake’s Art Focus interview on KBOO with Andrea Boyle and Sarah Farahat here: http://kboo.fm/node/29710
July 20th: Journalism and New Media in the Middle East: Lecture and Discussion with Stanford Fellow Jenka Soderburg and Palestinian Journalist Saed Bannoura
July 30th,:First Hand: A Night of Storytelling from the West Bank and Gaza.
August 3rd: From South Africa to Palestine: The shaping of a movement through Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions
States Parties shall assure to the child who is capable of forming his or her own views the right to express those views freely in all matters affecting the child, the views of the child being given due weight in accordance with the age and maturity of the child.
- Article 12 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CCRC)
The Iraqi Children’s Art Exchange has organized 16 mural projects created by children and supporting adults, working in communities across America, and in Baghdad, Iraq and Amman, Jordan.
We worked through churches, independent media centers, international NGOs, art galleries, museums, and community organizations. The mural projects created a unique opportunity for Iraqi and American youth to express themselves across the barriers of language, culture and politics. Painting in response to the question, How will they know us? young artists used their creative talents to speak on their own behalf, describing themselves and their communities, sharing their cultural and historical identity across the deep divide created by years of war.
The works created by these children will be on display at the Northampton Center for the Arts, which will also host a series of events including readings, film screenings and discussions. I had the pleasure of meeting Claudio Lefko, founder of the Iraqi Children’s Art Exchange, at the Transcultural Exchange conference in March. I have been looking forward to this exhibition ever since.
Having the Life of Our Times:
A community response to children, war and the possibilities for peace
Wednesday, June 22 – Friday, June 24
The following events all take place at the Northampton Center for the Arts, 17 New South Street, Northampton.
Wednesday, June 22, 5:00 p.m.
Having the Life of Our Times
The main exhibit of acrylic-on-canvas murals
Two Artist, Two Cultures, Two Views
Exhibit by Thamir Dawood and Harriet Diamond. Runs June 20 – July 31.
Wednesday, June 22, 7:00 p.m.
And Their “Views” Will Be Given Due Consideration
A panel discussion reflecting on the murals, children’s art, and Iraqi history and culture
Thursday, June 23, 12:00 noon, West Gallery
Gallery Talk with artists Thamer Dawood and Harriet Diamond
Thursday, June 23, 7:30 p.m.
Aftermath
A staged reading of a play written and produced by Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen, with talk-back
Friday, June 24, 12:00 noon, West Gallery
Noon time discussion: Iraq and the US, The Possibilities for Reconciliation
Friday, June 24, 7:30 p.m.
An Evening of Dance, Music, Readings and Spoken Word Performance
The UMass Student Union Art Gallery, the Fine
Arts Center, and the Springfield Vet Center, in collaboration with
UMass Veteran Services and the Veterans Education Project of Amherst,
will be presenting an art exhibit by war veterans called Creative
Expressions. Applications are now being accepted. Work must be
created by combat veterans. Learn more.
Deadline: September 1, 2011
www.fineartscenter.com
www.springfieldvetcenter.org
www.umass.edu/rso/suag
www.umass.edu/veterans/
www.vetsed.org
Additional Events:
November 2, 7:30 PM “The Things They Carried”- A play based on the book by Tim O’Brien at UMass Bowker Auditorium
October 31—November 19 “Creative Expressions “- An art exhibit by War
Veterans at the UMass Student Union Art Gallery
Opening Reception—Nov 2, 5-7PM
Film Series Symposium
Please check the Fine Arts Center website in August for detailed information.
Study on the theme of the hanging odes: Al-Mu'allaqat, acrylic on canvas, 140x118cm, 1980
Profile: Azzawi, Blessed Tigris, fibre-glass sculpture, at the British Museum
http://www.britishmuseum.org/explore/highlights/highlight_objects/on_loan_from/d/dia_al-azzawi,_blessed_tigris,.aspx
Dia talks about why it is important to mount the exhibition of Iraqi artists at The Station Museum of Contemporary Art in the fall of 2008. Documentary in progress supported by Artists Rescue Mission and The Station Museum.
The first Iraqi woman artist to have a solo exhibit in Baghdad, al-Attar has exhibited throughout Europe and the US, as well as in Iraq. She was born in Baghdad, studied at the California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo and at the University of Baghdad. She left Baghdad and settled in the UK in the 1970s. There, she received a graduate degree in printmaking from Wimbledon School of Art in London and another degree in printmaking from the Central School of Art and Design in London.
Links:
http://www.gagallery.com/Artists_map.html&cur=1&artid=20
http://www.thebritishmuseum.ac.uk/wordintoart/word-into-art/artists/attar.html
http://www.arthistoryarchive.com/arthistory/arabic/Iraqi-Artists.html
http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/artists/unveiled/
Saatchi Gallery, Chelsea UK
Jan 30th – May 9th 2009
Kader Attia, Ghost, 2007, Aluminium foil Dimensions variable
“Charles Saatchi … has put together an exhibition of contemporary art from the Middle East which contains elements that could provoke dramatically hostile reactions from Muslim fundamentalist quarters. In our hypersensitive times, after the fatwa condemning Salman Rushdie and the violent reaction to the Danish cartoons of the Prophet, Saatchi might be testing his luck in celebrating homosexual images of cavorting naked Muslim men, and cartoonish sculptures of Tehran prostitutes and transsexuals.
Yet however combustible it may turn out to be, Saatchi has good reason to put on this top-notch survey of Middle Eastern contemporary art. News of the Middle East today is dominated by images and reports of death and destruction, of terrorists and refugees, and the human misery caused by long-held political and religious antagonism. This widespread conflict overshadowing the region has tended to obscure the remarkably vibrant contemporary art scene that is alive and well in the countries of the Middle East and its diaspora.”
- Joanna Pitman , Unveiled: New Art from the Middle East at Saatchi Gallery
Unveiled, the new Saatchi Gallery’s second show lays bare the Middle East in all its raw and quirky glory, The Times, 1/27/09, retreived 1/19/11, http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/visual_arts/article5592197.ece
A project of The National Veterans Art Museum
The distance is great.
The disconnect is great.
The impact is deep.
“The occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan have and will continue to leave deep scars in our hearts and minds; and for some of us these scars are emblazoned on our physical bodies and memories. Too often these occupations are swept from our conscience, into the alleys of our streets, into the corners of our city and our collective minds. If they are ever to come to end, their myriad effects must be recognized, unearthed, uncovered, demystified , and exposed!”
- Full program
Meridel Rubenstein mixes mediums and metaphors to make art about our tenuous connection to place. Originally trained as a photographer, she combines disparate materials such as earthy palladium prints with cold steel mounts, transparent photographic imagery with imagery sandblasted into glass, video imagery projected onto cast glass, and digital still imagery on floating vellum and hand-coated tree bark papers. A sense of fragility, transparency, and passage, in her works, underscores a possibility for change. Her complex narrative photoworks and installations derive from a sense of place, personal and collective history as well as myth — the precarious landscape of the cultural mind.
In more recent work, like Joan’s Arc/Vietnam, she uses Vietnam and the American war as a mirror for different ideas in the east and west about nature/ body /place / forgiveness. Large luminous digital prints on hand coated paper combine with video projections and objects in wood and sandblasted glass. The image in this blog post was part of the Odysseus Project Art Exhibit: The Hidden Costs of War in 2010.
Reknown art writer Rebecca Solnit has written of Meridel Rubenstein:
…a consummate maker of metaphors, an artist who can never talk about only one thing at a time, but speaks of things in relationship, of lives to landscapes, of corporeal location and homing in terms of labyrinths and minotaurs, of bombs in terms of other myths, of physicists in relationship to pueblos.
Aaron Hughes is an artist, activist, and a Veteran of the Iraq War. He served in the Illinois National Guard from 2000 to 2006. He was deployed to Kuwait and Iraq in April 2003 and stayed until July 2004 as an 88M truck driver. On his return to the states he has dedicated his life to making art that will deconstruct the culture of dehumanization and hate that was so prevalent while deployed. He is a member of Iraq Veterans Against the War. The artwork below was featured in the Odysseus Project Art Exhibit: The Hidden Costs of War in 2010.
Dust Memories is a series of drawings, paintings, and collages attempting to communicate the ambiguous and anxious moments of a deployment with the 1244th Transportation Company in support of combat operations in Iraq.
This book is conceived as a repeating cycle, which is a metaphor for my continually repeating thoughts of the experience, as well as representing the reality that this journey is still being carried out today by soldiers in Iraq.
~ Aaron Hughes
In the interview The Art of Deconstructing War, he talks about how his artwork helps to express his feelings about war. The video below shows Aaron Hughes talking about his exhibit Shifting Memories in the National Vietnam Veterans Art Museum in 2007. In this exhibit Aaron Hughes shares a series of projects that bring to the forefront the very complex personal realities of the War in Iraq:
Read more about Aaron Hughes in these two previous blog posts: Aaron Hughes: Drawing for Peace and Aaron Hughes: Ahmed.
