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Art initiative seeks to help Create Peace
(by Sali McSherry - July 14, 2010)
Art initiative seeks to help Create Peace
By SALI McSHERRY
"My art is my voice," "stand together" and "live in peace" were just three of the messages schoolchildren wanted to share in banners they made for their schools.
The art initiative is led by 35-year-old Ross Holzman, who grew up in Gates Mills, and is founder and executive director of the nonprofit Create Peace Project, which was formed in 2008.
The organization was created in response to a couple of major factors, he said, including "the high levels of violence in the world, both globally and locally," and "the significant lack of anything positive, uplifting and peaceful in the media."
Mr. Holzman, who lives in the San Francisco Bay area, said the project also was a response to the education crisis across the country where art programs often are cut first. Creative self-expression is one of the greatest tools for fostering self-awareness, he said.
This fall, the organization is rolling out "Peace Exchange" and working to gather 10,000 school-age children in the United States to participate in a project with Indian students in which they send and receive postcards expressing their love and desire for peace with their words and art. The organization has been developing and plans to offer this fall an art for peace based curriculum for teachers to integrate into their studies, a complement to participating in Create Peace Project workshops.
Mr. Holzman reached 3,000 kids earlier this year in Uganda by teaching workshops in schools in which peace postcards and murals were created. He said the intention is to give students an opportunity to experience moments of peace and also to tap into their vision and expression of what peace looks like to them. There is calmness, he said, and a centering that happens when there is a large group of students sitting quietly together and reflecting on what peace means to them.
So far, 15 schools in the San Francisco Bay area, and 12 schools across 10 states and others in Uganda have participated in workshops for the Peace Exchange, he said.
He said he is fund-raising for an initiative on a request from Uganda representatives who have seen the merit of his work, to bring a team and teach community leaders how to develop the Create Peace workshop and take it back to schools in their communities, he said. There's a potential for a half-million kids to participate, he said.
As a child, Mr. Holzman and a friend created and drew their signature line of characters called "freak." He loved ceramics, which he initially learned at the Fairmount School of Fine Arts. As a student at University School in Hunting Valley, he was more inclined to play sports like soccer and basketball, but still enjoyed working in ceramics. "I never considered myself an artist," Mr. Holzman said.
He graduated from Miami University in Oxford with a degree in marketing. He worked in sales and then as a consultant in sales and training for a startup company in India, where he lived for a year.
When he returned to the states in December 2002, he lived in Los Angeles and had a massive shift in his perspective after witnessing in India the dire poverty and extreme conditions and "glimpsed the spirituality."
In America, it was all about consumerism, he said. Mr. Holzman opposed the war in Iraq and began a journey in peace activism, with political art and large-scaled banners for peace. His marketing background has helped him, promoting positive messages of empowerment back into the public eye. Forming Create Peace Project was part of his evolution, he said.
To learn more about how to participate in Create Peace Project, call (415) 385-4065.
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