"I never meant to have it take over my life," said Claudia Lefko, director of the Northampton-based Iraqi Children's Art Exchange.
A former preschool teacher, Lefko began the art exchange in 2000 when she and a fellow member of the Northampton Committee to Lift the Sanctions on Iraq, Kathleen Winkworth, took part in a visit to Baghdad to deliver medical supplies. Lefko and Winkworth, however, added their own project to the mission, collecting some 400 pictures created by area youth and bringing them, along with hundreds of dollars' worth of art supplies, to Baghdad.
"In the first Gulf War, the sanctions for kids were very dire," said Lefko. "Five thousand to 7,000 kids were dying every month. [They] took medicines, and they certainly needed that, but I thought they might like to have something else."
Once in Iraq, the women, dubbed "the women with colors" by locals, distributed the drawings and supplies to an elementary school and the cancer ward at Al-Mansour Pediatric Hospital. Each child who received a picture drew one in return to be distributed in the Pioneer Valley.
This scenario replayed itself multiple times over the next few years. Lefko returned to Baghdad three times before it became too dangerous. In 2006, she made her first visit to Amman, Jordan, where tens of thousands of Iraqis were living in exile.
Armed with more artwork from American youth, Lefko once again distributed pictures and art supplies, facilitating a cross-cultural exchange.
For the latest art exchange, Lefko has stepped it up a notch—students in Jordan and the Pioneer Valley have created large murals depicting their environments. For the past few weeks, 15 area students from schools in Northampton, Conway and Leverett, along with local artists Lydia Nettler and Harriet Diamond and Iraqi artist Thamer Dawood (who is in the U.S. on a six-month visa), created a mural with images of Northampton, including cyclists, gender symbols, books, street musicians, the city hall and the Connecticut River. Titled "How Will They Know Us?", the mural is a collective answer to the question of how the students view their culture.
"We asked them to draw something about themselves and the people around them," said Lefko. "I want to get people thinking about how people think about us."
The resulting mural, along with a mural created by Iraqi refugee children featuring iconic images of their own homeland, is on display in the Northampton Center for the Arts. These two murals have the chance to join numerous other murals in Egypt in September of 2010 as part of the Art Miles project, a collective international effort to support UNESCO's "Decade of Peace and Nonviolence Among Children of the World." Murals from over 100 countries will be digitized to cover a framed structure—a "pyramid"—with some 12 miles of surface area.
"Kids in both countries [Iraq and America] that have grown up since 1990 have an increasingly negative image of each other," said Lefko. "But this [project] allows them to realize that the people in the country are different than the country itself."
"How Will They Know Us?" is on display through Jan. 31 at the Northampton Center for the Arts, 17 New South Street, Northampton, (413) 584-7327, www.nohoarts.org.
