The fake child artists of Gaza
owing to pressure from the Bay Area's Jewish community, Oakland's Museum of Children's Art has decided to cancel its planned exhibition of drawings by Palestinian children documenting their experiences during the 2008-2009 Israeli invasion of the Gaza Strip.
Organized by the Middle East Children's Alliance, "A Child's View of Gaza" was supposed to run from September 24th through mid-November; however, the public reaction against displaying the pictures convinced the museum's board of directors to halt its plan.
The San Francisco Chronicle reports:
It had become a distraction to the main objective of bringing arts education to all children, said museum board member Randolph Bell.
"We were getting calls from constituents that were concerned about the situation," Bell said.
"We don't have any political stake in this thing. It just became apparent that we needed to rethink this."
"We understand all too well the enormous pressure that the museum came under. But who wins?" asked Middle East Children's Alliance president Barbara Lubin in a press release. "The museum doesn’t win. MECA doesn’t win. The people of the Bay Area don’t win. Our basic constitutional freedom of speech loses. The children in Gaza lose."
Pictures from the exhibit, which were culled from art therapy sessions at a number of Gaza children's centers, show images like a bomb painted with American and Israeli flags crashing into a street filled with dead bodies, helicopters destroying a city and a boot decorated with a Star of David stomping on a Palestinian flag.
Well, we wouldn't want to be considered censors, so let's look at the artwork that is available online. Here is every one I could find.
A display of pictures in a State Street coffee house drawn by Palestinian children has stirred commotion among the UW-Madison community.
The 4-day pictures display that began Sunday, entitled \Innocence Under Siege: Palestinian Children's Perspectives of the World Around Them," is presented by the Palestinian Humanities and Arts Now, a Chicago-based group, in conjunction with Al-Awda, the Palestinian Right to Return Coalition. The pictures were along the wall at Espresso Royale Caffe, 650 State St., until last evening.
Images were drawn by middle school aged Palestinian children and focus predominantly on violence in the Middle East. One picture, for example, shows a woman cradling the bloody body of a man, probably her husband, with a person holding a gun in the background. Other pictures show Israeli tanks and Palestinian towns and children surrendering.
"Our organization put the pictures up because they present a reality and experiences that are completely silenced in the United States media," said UW-Madison senior Sarah Kaiksow, co-chair of the UW-Madison chapter of Al-Awda. "I feel like for any true peace to be negotiated between any two parties in any conflict, the reality of what those people are facing needs to be negotiated."
But members of Madison's Jewish community, including those of UW-Madison's Hillel, say they are offended by some of the artwork, including pictures on which a child wrote things like "Death for Israel," "From North to South it's only Palestine" and "Bloodshed is the language of Israel." That particular picture was drawn by an eighth-grader.
The symbolism, the coloring and the motifs seem, at the very least, to have been heavily prompted by adults. Kids don't come up with this stuff on their own.
FresnoZionism asked an art professor for an opinion on these pieces. Here's what she said:
The paintings (color drawings) are highly sophisticated especially in relationship to detail. Did you see the barbed wire? Also, there is a carefully drawn Star of David in each work. The authenticity of the painting is remarkable for a child’s hand. The drawing of the planes and helicopters, the man in the tower, the dynamic brushstrokes that are well conceived and controlled all seem to project a more mature approach to art. Could these “children” be in their late teens, college age, or young adults [MECA says they were 9 to 11 years old]? According to the the quote, “much of the artwork was produced by children.” I wonder how “much”? Also, it is possible that the “children” were directed by an adult who supervised and perhaps completed the initial drawing?
elderofziyo
