As our societies become increasingly multicultural, we need alternative visions of what it means to coexist, interact, and learn in community with each other. The PEACE initiative seeks to imagine a future that celebrates the plenitude and diversity of the world’s cultures within three major objectives:
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focusing on our shared human interests in peace, equity, and justice by providing fora in which the arts provide an expressive vocabulary for the examination of social and political issues affecting our communities.
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creating a space in which visual and performing artists can acknowledge difference and advocate creative, nonviolent conflict resolution by engaging with each other and their audiences, especially young people. The goal of this cross-cultural exchange of artistic ideas is to foster new aesthetic directions and endeavors, renewing our commitment to understanding each other and to peace and justice.
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relying on the arts as a platform for social innovation and peace education, in order to inspire hope and build bridges across cultures.
Under the broad umbrella of a celebration of cultural plurality, the PEACE initiative has three major objectives:
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The first is to create a space for the free cross-cultural exchange of artistic ideas, and to foster the kind of internal dialogue among artists and individuals that leads to new aesthetic directions, new styles, new techniques. The common factor in these creative endeavors will be a renewed commitment to understanding each other, and to the cause of peace and justice across communities.
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The second objective of the PEACE initiative is to draw artists and their audiences into a discussion with each other. PEACE will provide fora at which artists can explore and revitalize their expressive vocabulary, and where their voices will be heard by people who are open to re-thinking social and political issues. In the cause of peace a whole range of registers is acceptable: from the gently questioning to the provocative, from the plangent to the sharply critical.
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The third objective is to mobilize the Arts as educational forces. Seeing artists in the vanguard of a movement towards renewing a common world, the PEACE project seeks to expose students and young people to their work. Reaching through technique and form, a new generation of leaders will touch the sources of cultural renewal for the communities we live in
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