Youth Art in Uganda

An organization in Atlanta, called the Youth Art Connection, is collaborating with International Paint Pals to organize a youth art exhibition for the 2008 Summer Olympic Games in Beijing, China. The artworks will be created by children from around the world and are to be displayed as a collection that focuses on how sports and play foster friendship, community, leadership, and success.

I've recently been contacted by YAC and IPP to work with Ugandan youth and facilitate their involvement with the Beijing Project. I will also be working with displaced Sudanese at Rhino Refugee Settlement in the upcoming weeks.

These images are from an afternoon spent at NACWOLA, the Ugandan National Association of Women Living with HIV/AIDS. The mothers of these child participants are members of NACWOLA, where they participate in psychosocial support opportunities and some receive antiretroviral drug therapy, nutritious food, and additional services. Their children are also involved in after-school care and in special events/opportunities, like this. To learn more about NACWOLA, visit: http://www.designerswithoutborders.org/nacwola.html

This was a really fantastic experience for me and for these excellent artists, who displayed much more than their creativity; excitement, delight, and curiosity guided our workshop that began with exploration of self-portraits and continued into a discussion (thanks to my Lugbara translator!) about sports and fellowship and accordingly, complimentary visual depictions.

Working Hard:

Some self portraits:

Some "sports and community" pieces:

Those of you who know me well, know that this was to my complete and utter delight! The event was sporadically punctuated with laughs, but the majority of participants kept quite quiet as they poured themselves onto the paper. This is a striking contrast to the way children participated in the art/photography workshops I organized in the US, where often the only reason young boys participated was because soccer was cancelled. Without going into too much art-theory, the work was fascinating; the compositions, color choices, and specific depictions were particularly striking -- children posed themselves doing both their actual daily activities (carrying jerrycans, praying with family, going to school), but many took creative liberties and depicted wildly different realities -- for example, a girl with white skin and a Mohawk, a small boy speeding on a multi-colored motorcycle, wearing funny glasses, etc.

I also found it really interesting and somewhat endearing that, unlike students in the US who tend to gobble up all resources presented (I need glitter glue AND buttons AND watercolors AND pencils), the process of sharing and resource utilization was incredibly diplomatic. I didn't bring enough writing pencils for everyone, figuring that the bounty of markers, colored pencils, and crayons would suffice, however, I immediately recognized this mistake when all the students really wanted to use pencils before adding color. So we broke all the pencils in half, someone ran to the nearest kiosk to pick up some razor blades, and we whittled our pencils to twice the number. Students with erasers shared, students without waited. The resulting images were really meticulously crafted, and not the brown mess that I've become used to seeing elsewhere :)

I'll be returning in a few weeks for follow up image making - maybe collage? maybe painting? I love feeling that the possibilities, on my side and their side, are open and endless, and having a reem of paper awaiting manipulation only helps reiterate this.