OUR GOALS

The Yerba Buena Center for the Arts has invited Rebuilding Alliance to exhibit our interactive multimedia exhibition, Gaza in Colors: Stories from Behind the Wall on Thursday September 20th in their community gallery room. This is an important opportunity as we launch our traveling exhibition — we seek public relations assistance to attract and engage visitors here and nationwide as the exhibition crosses the U.S. to its eventual display on the Mall in Washington DC and at the U.N. in New York City.

We need help with media strategy, marketing, and communications, specifically,

• Establish Gaza in Colors as a serious traveling exhibition to attract the sponsorship of other prominent galleries;

• Attract 200 visitors or more for the September event at YBCA; Attract audiences, both in-person and online, for the 'Live from Gaza' Teleconferences featured in the venue;

• Pitch the event to radio and TV stations. Develop in-depth coverage in print media that includes discussion of art, human rights, and politics;

• Establish an art market for Gaza artists to bring about economic recovery through web-based sales;

We also want to encourage visitors to take action to ease suffering: (a) email Congress to lift the blockade, (b) donate to send solar lights to Gaza's children, and (c) send messages to Gaza families by posting on the It's Time for Light facebook page. Lastly, we want to find grant funding to extend this traveling exhibition.

INVITING YOU TO JOIN US

This project is a good investment of your time because the art is outstanding and it touches hearts, Gaza is in the news, and Rebuilding Alliance has remarkable access built through years of trust and experience. Your efforts will build understanding and help to walk-back man-made tragedy.

Rebuilding Alliance’s art event, Gaza in Colors: Stories from Behind the Wall, strives to cross real and superficial barriers to help beholders understand their commonalities with Palestinians in Gaza. But the Gazans have been stifled and have no voice -- so they speak through art. This event series permits them to talk from a blockaded place. It gives them a voice to reach people from their violent, war-torn home — stretches out a hand to reach for from the darkness of isolation.

The interactive teleconferencing with artists, writers, UN, labor, and NGO leaders in Gaza is not propaganda — it’s human. The timbre of another’s voice speaking about their experience humanizes news headlines and dissolves barriers.

The final aspect of this event is a video describing each of the artists and telling his or her story, entitled “Art Under Siege.” The contrast between the dynamic interviewees with their vibrant paintings and the weary, crumbling backdrop is stark. These artists are literally locked in Gaza. But with this art event their work and meaning can stretch far beyond where they can physically travel, and they can make a real difference in what the world sees.

Gaza in Colors: Stories from Behind the Wall explores our common humanity. The only things that truly divide us are the barriers in our minds – by building compassion, these divisions are dissipated for good. If the blockade is ever to be removed, start here.

WE'RE READY

A year ago, we opened the exhibition for 10 days at the OXO Building on the Thames in London, working with filmmaker Maurice Jacobsen. In September, 2017, we showed the exhibition for a day in the House Rayburn Office Building in Washington DC. In July, we opened Gaza in Colors: Stories from Behind the Wall for four days at a gallery in the Ceasar Chavez Building, San Francisco State University, working with filmmaker Antoine Remy. Now we move on to the YBC event, followed by a showing at the Resource Center for Nonviolence in Santa Cruz in early September.

We've been partnering with Non-Governmental Organizations in Gaza since 2003, when the parents of the late American, Rachel Corrie, became founding board members of Rebuilding Alliance. Our executive director has a permit that lets her go in and out of Gaza despite the blockade — and so we see what is happening and have access that is not widely available. With that comes the responsibility to help Gazans be heard. Rebuilding Alliance has been holding Contact Congress teleconferences with Congressional staff and with audiences locally and nationwide since 2008. We bring speakers to Congress and for nationwide speaking tours twice a year and we'll be bringing Palestinian children to speak to Congress for International Peace Day in September.

A member of the Yerba Buena staff is on our board of directors and our board is hands-on and helpful. We're a small scrappy organization with a great team of volunteers.

We're thrilled to be implementing this project at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and using that to move the exhibition forward to many more venues in the year ahead. Please join us.