We’ve been lucky enough to be mention in Art Info, an international art magazine and website. One of the co-organizers of our Kaleidoscope event (see below) has written an extensive piece about art and our approach to art in Haiti. Please check it out:
Over the last eight months or so, I’ve been working with a group here in Chicago on a mission to stabilize and fund an art center in Jakmel, Haiti headed up by the Frame Family Foundation and its delegate, local art activist Susan Frame. I was brought into the project by Steve Raden, an old Chicago friend of mine and activist humanitarian in the field who has traveled extensively in third world countries, often exclusively on his own dime, to help provide aid where he could, and there are real, clear egalitarian reasons for working to support such a project. As the stories I’ve heard serve to illustrate, the Jakmel center functions as a safe haven from persecution by others in Haitian society who find hate a productive response to lesbian and gay male lifestyles, or who find those physically handicapped in the wake of the earthquake easy pickings. They also work to imbue its participants with art-making knowledge and skills that give them an export upper-hand in their own localized markets and, at a minimum, a means of realizing a productive living.
