wfn.org | Exhibit Features Palestinian Kid's Art

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Note #6558 from PCUSA NEWS to PRESBYNEWS:

8-June-2001
GA01001

Exhibit Features Palestinian Kid's Art

by Alexa Smith

LOUISVILLE, June 8 - Lori Hayes was prompted to put an art exhibit together
by a book that promised photographs of children from different countries,
ethnicities and religions.  When she flipped through its pages, she didn't
see any kids that looked like the ones she taught in Palestine.

There was a page on Israel, but no children from the West Bank or Gaza were
on it.

"It was like these children did not exist, erased from a world-wide
children's map," says Hayes who is back in the States now and teaches art at
a school north of Boston.  "The void, not the content, began to leap from
the pages.  How many other groups of children were left out of this book
dedicated to all children, how many other have been ignored or become
voiceless?  And so it has become a justice issue:  to tell about these
children, or rather, to let them speak themselves, through their art …
perhaps even adding a page to the world-wide children's book."

What Hayes did was put together her own book, "Bright Wings."  It was
published in 1999 by the Division of Overseas Ministries of the Disciples of
Christ, the agency that, jointly with the United Church of Christ, placed
her in a Friends School called Rawdat El Zuhur to teach art to Palestinian
kids from kindergarten to age 13.  It is a montage of photos of the kids and
the art they created.

You don't have to buy the book to see what they drew.  It is hanging along
the "Second Level Walkway," which connects the plenary and exhibit halls to
the second-floor meeting rooms.

The paintings and crayon drawings hung last year at the Wenham Museum in
Wenham, Mass., as part of a children's exhibit.  They've been displayed,
largely, in the Northeast.

It was Wendy Matthewson, a Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) volunteer in
Jerusalem and a senior at McCormick Theological Seminary in Chicago, who
thought the art ought to be part of the 213th General Assembly here in
Louisville.  "Palestinian children are often forgotten in all the attention
that goes to the conflict in the area," says Matthewson, whose own time in
Jerusalem was cut short because of the violence.

"I wanted to just lift them up and remind Presbyterians of the humanity of
Palestinian children," she said.

The drawings are of all aspects of Palestinian life.

Inaas, grade 4, shows his audience a mustachioed man in a fez, or, a Turkish
hat.  Ibae, grade 5, draws olive-pickers on ladders, hard at work in the
trees. Mahmoud, grade 5, shows the merchants lined up at Jerusalem's ancient
Damascus Gate, one of the doors into the exotic Old City where the Church of
the Holy Sepulcher sits, as well as the Temple Wall and the Al-Aska Mosque,
the site where rioting erupted last September and then spread across the
West Bank and Gaza.

Hayes says she was a typical politically naïve American when she arrived in
Jerusalem, learning to speak Arabic with the first graders at the school
where she taught.

"I was very ignorant.  But when you live there, you see injustice that is
going on.  You see the tension people live under.  There are these awful
forms of violence.  Most of the time I was there," she said, referring to
1997-99, "we lived in anticipation of violence.

"It is a miracle that none of this erupted earlier," Hayes said, describing
a world of military check-points, demolished Palestinian homes and denied
permits, even for Palestinians who want to build on their own land.

"Most of the drawings are of rainbows and street scenes, celebrations, but
there are other things too.  In the book, there's a drawing of settlers
taking over a home.  In the exhibit, there's a drawing of bulldozers
demolishing an Arab home," said Hayes, who described, then, how the Israeli
army routinely bulldozes residences on land that the Israeli government
claims - even though a Palestinian family may hold the deed.  "They're
drawing their everyday lives.  The reality is:  Palestinians are living
under occupation and they have been for 50 years.

She said her classes were, however, full of  Palestinian children with
fingers sticky with glue and paint.  "They're like kids all over the world
..

"What I hope most people see is the children here, for what they are."

To arrange for an exhibition of the children's art, contact Derrick Duncan
of the Middle East Office of the United Church of Christ at 216-736-3220.

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