Artolution, a nonprofit cofounded and co-directed by TC Art & Art Education doctoral student Max Levi Frieder, is known for creating "public art" - efforts that bring together street youth, refugees, people who are incarcerated and others from marginalized groups -- to produce murals in countries around the world.
Now, Frieder and his co-executive director, Joel Bergner, have brought one of those efforts to New York City: A mural, now hanging in Oculus Building - the combination transportation hub, plaza and shopping mall that sits adjacent to the memorial site for the 9/11 terrorist attacks - that they created with Rohingya children in the Balukhali Refugee Camp in Bangladesh, working with eight local Rohingya artists.
Previously Artolution and its partner, UNICEF USA, had worked with more than 200 New Yorkers and visitors to the Oculus Building to create a mural that was then given as a gift to the children at Balukhali.
The Rohingya fled Myanmar last summer when the nation's armed forces and police began an organized persecution of them in Rakhine State in the country's northwestern region. The mural at the Oculus Building depicts "the hopes and dreams of refugee children," including their visions of "futures of getting to attend school and rebuilding their lives without fear," write Frieder and Bergner in a recent email to followers of their work.
Watch clips of Frieder and Bergner on CBS This Morning, and of Rohingya children in Balukhali Camp, on Artolution's site, at https://www.artolution.org/
Read a previous TC story on Max Frieder.