The fifteenth anniversary of Kids' Guernica held at Florida State University celebrated over 200 peace murals by children from more than 40 countries. Artists, educators, and community activists and organizers gathered from around the world to share their stories of mural making as peace building. The original murals between students in Florida and Japan fifteen years ago were created to honor the 50th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima. The Florida State University Museum of Fine Arts will host an exhibition of the murals through January 31st. http://www.mofa.fsu.edu/
The goal is to build a bridge of peace and understanding, ultimately to save the world from further devastating warefare. 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 and ask if not through art, then what? Certainly biology and physics and agriculture and chemistry give us wonderful practical 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 Kid's Guernica Peace Mural Project and initiatives like it, we want nothing less than to save the world through intercultural tolerance and understanding. One bridge at a time.
-Tom Anderson, Ph.D, Florida State University, Co-founder of the Guernica Peace Mural Project
As part of the weekend mural arts program, international students from local schools painted a mural with the theme "A Global Village".
This is AWESOME!
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