KSU’s Wick Poetry Center: SpeakPeace
Kent State University’s Wick Poetry Center and School of Art Galleries have collaborated with Soldier’s Heart, a veterans’ return and healing organization, to create the Vietnamese Children’s Art Exhibit. This exhibit features Vietnamese children’s drawings and paintings on themes of peace and war that have been collected by the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City, Viet Nam. Paired with original poems written by American children, veterans, and established poets, this collaborative, international art exhibit encourages a creative dialogue between image and word, promoting cross-cultural understanding, reconciliation, and global citizenship.
This exhibit will debut for the first time in the United States in September of 2010 at Kent State University, then be featured at the 2010 International Peace and War Summit at Case Western Reserve University in October, 2010, then travel nationally. The exhibit is sponsored by The National Peace Academy, Writers in the Schools Alliance, England’s National Association for Writers in Education, and the Inamori International Center for Ethics and Excellence at Case Western Reserve University.
The logo design combines a simple typographic treatment with an origami dove graphic to create a unified design. The dove is an obvious symbol of peace, but showing it in an origami style gives it a hand-made and personal touch – representative of the artwork and poetry of the exhibit. The simple letterforms of the typography complement the basic shapes of the graphic. A multi-colored palette was chosen to give the design a sense of activity, friendliness and cultural diversity.
The website – www.speakpeace.net – showcases paintings and poems and serves as a virtual exhibit and place where healing, reconciliation and dialogue can begin.
