Drawing Hope is a new documentary series focusing on creativity as a positive response in some of the world’s most challenging environments. Directed by filmmaker Kevin O’Hanlon, the series introduces us to political climates around the world through the daily personal experience of a selected artist. Each episode reveals their creative inclinations and processes and how they are shaped by the conflict they witness. Creative resilience is constantly reinforced as a message that hope endures.

The second half of each episode connects the artist subjects with a group of children in the same afflicted area.

The artist facilitates an art project where the children are given the opportunity to express their creativity, emphasizing their personal and collective values, providing us with a perspective on how the upcoming generation view the world.

Each episode concludes with an art exhibition of the children’s work in a Chelsea, New York gallery accompanied by a documentary screening. Proceeds from the sales of artwork are then allocated to the children to aid in their creative development.

The initial projects which inspired the Drawing Hope series focused on Haiti, following the devastating earthquake in 2010. There, children of the Maranatha School and Orphanage were invited by the filmmaker to paint their hopes for the future. The 200+ images inspired the “I Am Haiti” exhibition. Sales from the exhibition funded the rebuilding of their school, destroyed in the disaster. The children’s artwork was then commissioned to be made into luxury cashmere scarves as the annual corporate gift presented by Conde Naste to their executives and clients.

Following the success of that project, the series continued with a documentary of a 23-year-old female Afghan graffiti artist, faced with the threat of execution by the Taliban for exhibiting her artwork. The “I Am Afghanistan” project included a painting project at Le Pelican School in Kabul, a bastion to Hazarra children, the most persecuted ethnic group in Afghanistan. An exhibit is currently being planned for the Afghan children’s artwork and we are hopeful we can bring the children’s creative renderings into further markets such as fashion to further increase awareness and support the children’s development.

The series intends to illuminate the politics of conflict from a grassroots, personal perspective and cultivate an awareness that in the midst of great upheaval and challenge there is also a constant stream of creative innovation which empowers us and future generations.

Upcoming projects take place in Dhaka, Bangladesh and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

In October 2012, the Drawing Hope series visited Le Pelican School on Kabul, Afghanistan.

The school, run by Ariane and Jacques Hiriart adminsiters to Hazara children. The Hazara population are descendants of Gengis Khan’s 1000 soldiers from the time of the Mongol Empire.  They are the third largest ethnic group in Afghanistan and the most historically persecuted, most brutally by the Taliban.

The paintings created with the children largely express a feeling of “home” – trees, rivers, mountains, sunshine. The Hazara have traditionally lived and farmed in mountainous regions of Afghanistan and neighboring Pakistan. Many have been dislodged from their homes and have settled in communities of Northern Kabul.

For young women in particular creative expression, indeed education,  is often not encouraged in Afghanistan.   These images are among the first created by the children of Le Pelican School.

Their paintings will be exhibited at Rogue Space | Chelsea in July 2013 and the proceeds returned to the school to further support the the children’s education program.

A week after the earthquake FilmsOnArtists went to Haiti and brought suitcases of canvasses and paint supplies for the children of the Maranatha School and Orphanage in Port-Au-Prince to create their first works of art.

The project was the initiative of documentary filmmaker Kevin O’Hanlon who collaborated with Haitian born artist Richard Laurent and a team of volunteers at the orphanage.

 The children painted what they wanted to occur in their lives – a home for their family, trees, clothes to wear, a car to drive to town in. We exhibited their paintings at our gallery, Rogue Space | Chelsea, New York and rebuilt their school with the proceeds.

The children’s artwork then entered the fashion world by creating a line of the finest cashmere scarves featuring the children’s images were created.  With their sale a sustainable community with trade schools, health facilities and and agriculture is being built so the children will step into the world they envisioned and expressed in those first images.  

[[Show as slideshow]]

23-year-old graffiti artist Malina Suliman’s murals of skeletons in burqas are breaking down barriers in Afghanistan—and have prompted death threats and attacks from the Taliban.   The artist’s signature motif—a skeleton in a blue burqa, which she has sprayed on walls in Kabul and Kandahar—is a pointed metaphor for her own condition in her homeland and the inequality and repression that Afghan women face.

Because of her graffiti art and its defiant political statements, Suliman says she has faced warnings and abuse from onlookers in Kandahar, where she is one of the few female artists. “People would say bad words and threaten to attack me and throw stones at me.  Then I would move to another spot and they would follow mer and throw more stones.”

Her treatment is not untypical typical in the predominantly Muslim nation where women are routinely denied basic rights like education and are often subject to abuse.   But one of Suliman’s greatest challenges lies at home.  Not only does she experience opposition from without, the 23-year-old’s father and five brothers don’t support her art,  “The night of my first exhibition,” the artist said with a wry laugh, “my family told me, ‘If you go, don’t come back.’”

Suliman’s work is now making waves in the Afghan capital, where she lived as a child after fleeing the violence of her native province. She had two Kabul exhibitions in December, a highlight of which was a sculpture of a woman in baggy clothing with a noose tied around her neck.

Her exhibition in Kandahar was the first there in three decades.  It included a piece called “Today’s Life,” which features a painting of a fetus in the womb suspended from a tree and being pulled in different ways.

The artist said the work reflected the frustrations of her generation. “Before a child is born, the parents are already thinking that a son can support them and a daughter can be married off to a wealthy suitor,” she said. “They don’t stop to think what the child may want.”

The Taliban’s austere 1996-2001 rule then banned most art outright, declaring it un-Islamic.

Since the Islamist group was toppled by a U.S.-led invasion almost 12 years ago, larger Afghan centers have resurrected a semblance of an art scene, but progress is slow.

The work I do now helps people move forward.

Even with the broken ground and the changes of the earthquake, we can still paint our experience.

When the earthquake happened I was working.  I was sitting here in the backyard working.

At first I thought that the world was over.

After a while I heard them say it was a natural forse, an earthquake.

It’s almost like Haiti is crying. 

And we can show in a painting how Haiti is crying.

This canvas here, with all the stuff that’s going on – the lightning,

everything is breaking but with the spirit of God, these children are protected.

It’s not God’s fault that people died.  It’s just the way things are.

But it also gave us something else.

It made us become closer to God.

I want to help kids when they are young.

So they can grow to be artists.

I have a dream that I have a very big school, and everyone around the world knows of it.

When you start to paint you start to see things differently.

You can think and you can make a painting that is positive.

It’s like you can take your dream and put it on canvas.

And that dream can become a reality…

A week after the earthquake FilmsOnArtists went to Haiti and brought suitcases of canvasses and paint supplies for the children of the Maranatha School and Orphanage in Port-Au-Prince to create their first works of art.

The project was the initiative of documentary filmmaker Kevin O’Hanlon who collaborated with Haitian born artist Richard Laurent and a team of volunteers at the orphanage.

 The children painted what they wanted to occur in their lives – a home for their family, trees, clothes to wear, a car to drive to town in. Their paintings were exhibited at our gallery, Rogue Space | Chelsea, New York and rebuilt their school with the proceeds.

The children’s artwork then entered the fashion world by creating a line of the finest cashmere scarves featuring the children’s images were created. With their sale a sustainable community with trade schools, health facilities and and agriculture is being built so the children will step into the world they envisioned and expressed in those first images.

[[Show as slideshow]]

Trailer for upcoming short film on Connecticut based painter Brad Guarino.

A week after the earthquake FilmsOnArtists went to Haiti and brought suitcases of canvasses and paint supplies for the children of the Maranatha School and Orphanage in Port-Au-Prince to create their first works of art.

The project was the initiative of documentary filmmaker Kevin O’Hanlon who collaborated with Haitian born artist Richard Laurent and a team of volunteers at the orphanage.

The children painted what they wanted to occur in their lives – a home for their family, trees, clothes to wear, a car to drive to town in. We exhibited their paintings at our gallery, Rogue Space | Chelsea, New York and rebuilt their school with the proceeds.

Now Franca Arts and Fashion Charity and TMS Group have brought the children’s art into the fashion world by creating a line of the finest cashmere scarves featuring the children’s images which will be launched this holiday season. With their sale we will create a sustainable community with trade schools, health facilities and and agriculture so the children will step into the world they envisioned and expressed in those first images. 100% of the proceeds go to the children.

We hope you will support the project and help us make the dreams the children poured into their paintings become reality.

Please visit our site www.IAmHaitiScarve.com

Sincerely yours,

Kevin O’Hanlon
Director, FilmsOnArtists
212-751-2210

Trailer for the upcoming short film on performance photographer Haley Morris-Cafiero.