CCA News

Community Arts Professor Claudia Bernardi Wins Major Grant from NALAC

Posted on Monday, February 15, 2010, by Lindsey Westbrook

NALAC, the National Association for Latino Arts and Culture, has awarded a $10,000 grant to Community Arts professor Claudia Bernardi and her organization Walls of Hope to carry out a mural project with survivors of the massacre of Panzós in Alta Verapaz, Guatemala.

Walls of Hope: Guatemala will take place in summer 2010. Local community members of all ages will plan and create a mural, assisted by Bernardi and other artist/teachers from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Argentina. The teaching artists all share the experience of surviving civil strife and violence, and they now work to bring healing to others through creativity.

Bernardi is an internationally known visual artist who works in the fields of human rights and social justice. For more than 20 years she has worked locally and internationally designing art-in-community projects for political refugees and survivors of torture from Latin America. In 2005 she founded Walls of Hope and the School of Art and Open Studio of Perquín. The projects she undertakes through these organizations employ art making as a way to nurture diplomacy, cultural exchange, and community building.

Another recent project in Guatemala, pictured here, also involved survivors of massacres.