What does peace look like?
Participants in the Peace and Justice Studies Association annual conference at the University of Alabama at Birmingham to be held Oct. 25-29 will endeavor to picture peace for a community project, “RE/Present Peace.”
Led by Assistant Professor Doug Baulos, MFA, of the College of Arts and Sciences' Department of Art and Art History, “RE/Present” participants will investigate the language of peace and hope through thematic, typographical drawing experiments. The activities at Project Space are from 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 25, and Thursday, Oct. 26, and from noon-3 p.m. Friday, Oct. 27. The Project Space activities are free and open to the public.
The works will then be assembled into a large collaborative installation and put on show in an exhibition at the DAAH’s Project Space, from 4-6 p.m. Alabama poet Ashley Jones will also present a reading at the reception. Project Space is located on the first floor of the Humanities Building, 900 13th St. South.
The project is presented in partnership with the Alabama School of Fine Arts, the Birmingham Holocaust Education Center and the UAB Department of Art and Art History. Artistic skill, experience or ability is not required or assumed. More than 50 students will participate.
Participants will use fine art materials and processes to physically make traces through drawing, take rubbings from uneven surfaces and layer. They can question the relationship between historic and current ideas of peace and interpret and visually represent the personal, social, political, historical and geographic elements central to mapping peace. Examples will illustrate realities and the imagination. Individual drawings on transparent grounds will overlap and merge to create a larger, collaborative community work. The goal is to engage communities and garner broad support by creating language for reflection, discussion, awareness and action that leads to new ways of interpreting peace.