Ποιειν Και Πραττειν - create and do

Kids' Guernica in USA

Already when Poiein kai Prattein started to organise in 2006 the first Kids' Guernica exhibition in Kastelli, Crete, Stacy Koumbis in Chicago started an action together with the Hellenic Museum in Chicago. That mural was donated then to the school of Kastelli to serve as bridge of understanding between Greek children in Crete and in Chicago.

This was followed up in 2007 when the Kids' Guernica Exhibition coincided with the ECCM Symposium 'Productivity of Culture' in Athens. Again Stacy Koumbis did manage to bring about a mural painted by children who dealt with the topic of global vision. Already the first mural was a kind of cross-cultural thematic approach to integration of Greek schools into the larger community of Chicago. Originally four schools should participate, but in the final end there were three, two Greek-American and one American school. Doing the mural together was a way of taking the Greek-American schools out of their relative cultural isolation.

Since then efforts have been made to promote Kids' Guernica in the United States. When Tom Anderson at the Florida State University in Tallahassee announced that he will organise a Kids' Guernica exhibition and a symposium about 'art education and social justice' at the beginning of January to mark the beginning of the year in which Kids' Guernica was celebrating its 15th anniversary, then from 2008 a lot of energy and time was spend on preparing this event.

Since the event in January 2010 in Tallahassee, Florida, there have followed Kids' Guernica exhibitions in St. Petersburg and Ohio, Cleveland. At the same, Rosa Naparstek has introduced Kids' Guernica to the Non Violence Centre of Martin Luther King in New York and initiated together with Fatema Nawaz and other artists behind many of the Kids' Guernica actions a network of the artists themselves with plans to hold group exhibitions to show how is actively behind Kids' Guernica.

For the catalogue of the exhibition in Tallahassee but also for an overview of Kids' Guernica murals created over the past 15 years go to:

www.insea.europe.ufg.ac.at/.../KIDS'_Guernica_2009_FSU_exhibition_catalog.pdf

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