Update #6: Final Report from Navigating the Aftermath; New Kickstarter Campaign
Dear Navigating the Aftermath Kickstarter Donors:
Thank you for your support of our Navigating the Aftermath campaign and tour in 2011! We've submitted our final report, which you can download here (narrative is last 4 pages): http://reconciliationproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/IARP-Arts-Tour-Final-Report-MN-State-Arts-Board.pdf. A few highlights from the report are below. We are currently in a strategic planning process to determine how to build on the very positive response we received during the tour's seven Minnesota stops.
The Iraqi and American Reconciliation Project (IARP) is also pleased to announce plans to bring three amazing Iraqi women artists from our new exhibit, Not About Bombs, to Minneapolis on March 2-4 for public artist talks and collaboration, but we need your help! We must raise $4,000 by March 1 to bring Sundus Abdul Hadi, Tamara Abdul Hadi, and Dena Al-Adeeb to Minneapolis. Please consider backing this Kickstarter project at http://kck.st/yJ4Tib--every contribution is important!
Images (from top to bottom): My Window by Tamara Abdul Hadi; the Not About Bombs exhibit space at Intermedia Arts in Minneapolis; Sundus Abdul Hadi, Tamara Abdul Hadi, and Dena Al-Adeeb; at the Opening Reception for Not About Bombs on February 3, 2012, at Intermedia Arts.
Images: various from the Navigating the Aftermath tour.
Highlights from the Navigating the Aftermath Final Report:
IARP ended its Navigating the Aftermath tour in October, 2011 with the tour’s last stop, in Duluth, MN. Through art and film, Navigating created a shared space for unfiltered Iraqi and American voices to speak about the war on Iraq and its consequences. The exhibit toured Minneapolis, Bemidji, Winona, Mankato, Ely, St. Cloud, and Duluth.
The exhibit featured established and emerging Iraqi and American artists in dialogue. In addition to visual art, the exhibit featured the film, The Unreturned, by Nathan Fisher and the play, No Place Called Home, by Kim Schultz.
We learned a lot of lessons from the tour, outlined in more depth in the final report, including:
- We received feedback from our partners that our print materials were less effective than our online promotion. In the future, we would perhaps focus more energy on an online publicity plan than on print.
- Our Ely and St. Cloud partners spent a significant amount of time getting local community members and businesses to sponsor their events, which resulted in higher audience turnout and community engagement. This was an unexpected success because we didn’t expect that sponsorships would lead to deeper engagement beyond match funding.
- Audience evaluation revealed that our audience skewed older, despite our efforts to engage local colleges, high schools and universities. This is a challenge for IARP in general when we deal with war-related themes. However, we feel that if social media outreach were stronger, we would have engaged a younger audience. We also feel that in the future it is particularly important to specifically target youth-oriented organizations to partner with. A major positive, however, was that audience evaluation showed the project did educate and provide depth to audience understanding of the Iraq War and its aftermath.
- Partner evaluation revealed that each partner would be willing to work with us again, and they all rated the art programming we provided as high quality and effective. Many expressed a desire to have had more local collaborations, more programming and more support with publicity. We feel that it is a huge accomplishment for IARP that each partner is interested in working with us again given the challenging nature of this subject matter. It speaks to the quality of the art programming that our nonpolitical, community arts partners felt that we presented these themes in an open, artistically rigorous, and non-divisive way.
- Major takeaways include greater selectivity in terms of partner organizations, and perhaps less tour stops in order to make the audience experience deeper and richer. Because this was our first time executing a statewide arts tour, there were inevitable challenges along the way; however, the project was a success overall and future IARP statewide arts programming will benefit greatly from this experience.
A few individual feedback responses:
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“Wonderful art.”
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“Sensitive, revealing.”
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“Beautiful, heartbreaking art work. A reminder that art of all kinds captures and expresses the human condition and experience like nothing else does.”
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“Very moving and powerful.”
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“Deepened my awareness of the long-term personal devastation war causes on a society and its peoples.”
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“It’s good to see how creative and resilient Iraq’s artists are.”
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“I hadn’t seen the Iraqis in this light before.”
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“Thank you for taking on this program. We need similar events to gain the kind of felt understanding art provides.”
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“Interesting and stimulating.”
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“I vicariously threw myself into envisioning their worlds of immense fear, grief and loss. This in turn gave me a powerful depth of understanding for the aforementioned, culminating in personal feelings of overt sadness over the atrocities of wars and this one in particular.”
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“The exhibit and film were top notch!”
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“What a collection of tragic stories shared and based on 'both sides' of the Iraq war. Powerful!”
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“The subject matter of both the exhibit and the film was relevant and had an immediacy that captured the audience.”
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“The film was excellent with everyday but dramatic stories of refugees’ daily lives. It conveyed well the frustration of people stuck the limbo of war-created chaos, unable to earn a living or use their talents and education.”
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“The interactive SPEAK table was extraordinary, giving people an opportunity to share their own comments & experiences.”
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“Through their experiences and presentations, Nathan & Luke offer outstanding examples of how one person can make a difference.”
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“I would rate the art programing 10 out of 10. Complex issues were delivered in the art exhibit and film in a very open, yet nonintrusive way.”
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“It was a great experience.”
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“A 10! I thought it was very thought provoking and engaging, and eye opening! In a very un-shaded way – the truth was shared by way of interviews and artwork.”
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“Very compelling.”
Thank you for your making this rich experience possible for so many people across Minnesota.
63
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This project successfully raised its funding goal on March 4, 2011.
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Limited edition, 12x18 poster of Navigating the Aftermath, designed by Zachary Keenan.
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Limited edition, 12x18 poster of Navigating the Aftermath, designed by Zachary Keenan and signed by a participating artist in the exhibit; and a limited edition, 12x18 poster of The Unreturned, designed by Katie McCarthy and signed by Director Nathan Fisher.
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Limited-edition copy of Navigating the Aftermath showbook with your name on the front cover, and a limited-edition, signed 12x18 poster of Navigating the Aftermath.
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Early-release copy of the documentary film, The Unreturned, signed by Director Nathan Fisher, and a limited-edition, signed 12x18 poster of The Unreturned.
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Limited-edition copy of Zainab's Story, a custom-designed book produced by participating artist Monica Haller and Clare Beer. The book tells the story of an Iraqi woman who lost her legs to an American missile and her ongoing journey toward recovery.
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A limited-edition copy of Iraqi Voices (a book that documents and reports Iraqi voices talking about their country and their needs in the face of 30 years of war and sanctions); and a limited-edition copy of Zainab's Story.
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Choice of an original Iraqi artwork from our collection: http://reconciliationproject.org/iraqi-art/; plus the above.
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A three-minute documentary on a subject of your choice by award-winning documentary film-maker Nathan Fisher! (If travel is required outside of the Minneapolis, MN area, donor must pay travel expenses.)
Project By
Iraqi & American Reconciliation Project
Last Login 05/26/12
Connected as Luke Wilcox (643 friends)
The Iraqi and American Reconciliation Project (IARP) and our partner in Iraq, the Muslim Peacemaker Teams (MPT), create bridges of communication, understanding and support between Americans and Iraqis that lead to tangible acts for rebuilding lives, relationships, and a country devastated by years of war, sanctions, and more war.
