Art With A Heart

Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Nicholas D. Kristof interviewed at new Skirball exhibit, Women Hold up Half the Sky.

The Skirball Cultural Center’s original exhibition, Women Hold Up Half the Sky opens October 27 and continues through March 11, 2012.  Inspired by the book penned by  Pulitzer Prize winning journalists Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide, this unique exhibit presents a call to action. Focusing on the worldwide oppression of women and girls through sex trafficking, gender-based violence and maternal mortality, this exhibition  features stories of women who have changed their lives through education, economics and self-determination with a little help.  Included are documentary photographs, visual art, sound installations and interactive gallery experiences including the opportunity to provide micro-loans to women entrepreneurs, thus changing their lives into ones of hope and freedom.  A dollar goes far in the lives of these women.  The Skirball Cultural Center’s Museum Director Robert Kirschner remarked “It is a unique hybrid of gallery installation and community engagement project, affording visitors multiple opportunity to learn, give, share, advocate and connect.”  This worldwide epidemic continues not only in distant lands, but in our own back yard.

In conjunction with this exhibition and commemorating 2012 as the United

Holiday Pop-Up Shop at the Skirball.

Nations International Year of Cooperatives, Audrey’s Museum Store at the Skirball presents a “holiday pop-up shop” featuring, unique, handcrafted goods from women’s cooperatives and female artisans from around the world.  Purchases will support more than 75 organizations that promote gender equality in developing nations helping women entrepreneurs provide for their families, educate their children and pass on deep-rooted artistic and cultural traditions.  The shop, features unique  jewelry, bags, ties, scarfs and other items perfect for holiday gifts,  is open through December 31.  Most items are online at www.skirball.org/shop.  Kristof and WuDunn’s book, Half the Sky is also available for purchase.  Buy a very special,  colorful gift and help save a life.

Pearls of Wisdom: End the Violence, an exhibition showing in conjunction with Half the Sky, tackles the critical social issue of domestic violence.  The exhibition resulted from a community art-making process by which survivors and concerned community members recast their personal memories of domestic pain into iridescent art objects.  Using the metaphor of pearls as treasures that form inside an oyster in response to a harmful irritant, each participant took an object that symbolized the abuse or assault and transformed it into a “pearl of wisdom.”

Skirball Cultural Center, 2701 Sepulveda Bl., Los Angeles

310/4404500  www.skirball.org