By Naomi Hofferber
UI senior Sarah Weszely has created an art showcase promoting peace and equality in Iowa City as a part of her capstone project for the engaged-social-innovation major. She has held numerous projects examining using art to discuss racial justice and equality.
“I think that what I was getting at was when you’re jamming with someone, musically, from different countries or different cultures or races, there’s a unity in that creating together,” Weszely said. “This is just one of the things I’ve tried.”
This is the first major project Weszely has curated and performed in. The showcase featured two of her visual and interactive art pieces and a performance.
One piece was a church confessional box created from ceiling tiles from the torn down Rose Oaks apartments that were replaced by the Quarters luxury student housing. In the confessional were poems to read.
“It’s kind of an example of Iowa City gentrification, class and equality, that kind of stuff that to me represents the hypocrisy of when I talk about white privilege, as if by talking about it I somehow evade it, but I’m living in a neighborhood that probably at some point had to kick out people that were poorer in order to build up housing for students,” Weszely said. “I wanted to build something that was like confessing my privilege.”
Her other visual piece was called Mercy, and involved poems lining the way to a red hammock, in which individuals could lie in while reading poetry. Weszely said the flip side to confessional was mercy, and that to her, the feeling of that mercy was a sublime experience, like lying in a hammock.
Another artist featured in the show was Fatima Saeed, a native of Sudan who has brought her art from Sudan to Syria to Oman to Jordan to the United States.
“We have enough everything that makes people shattered and torn, and families get lost. We just would like to say no to all of that,” Saeed said. “Art is a language itself, so people could get inspired by colors, different points of views, different cultures.”
Saeed said art allows people to communicate together to promote peace. Her art featured paintings and fabrics aimed to promote peace around the world.
UI sophomore Patrick Zhao featured his black and white sketches in the art showcase.
“A lot of [the art] is due to emotional frustration, some of its due to the beauty I found in my life,” Zhao said. “I want my art to be able to evoke some sort of emotion. Sometimes people look at art and they’re like ‘I don’t understand,’ or ‘What am I supposed to feel,’ or ‘Oh, that looks pretty cool.’ I want my art to start questioning things.”
Weszely said she wanted this event to bring people together.
“Hopefully this will be a very unifying event. I’m not of color, so I want people who are like me to come out of this feeling aware of issues without feeling bogged down by shame, which I think often keeps people from engaging in social justice in general,” she said. “I think that there’s a way to talk about how we’ve screwed up, but to do it in community and to do it in creativity, and there’s a way that we can still feel alive after doing so.”
