WILPF Peninsula/Palo Alto commemorates Hiroshima Day with Community Art Project
Published on August, 45 2022
WILPF members attend a participatory community art project in commemoration of Hiroshima. Photo credit: Judy Adams
by Judy Adams
WILPF Palo Alto
September 2022
On August 6, the WILPF Peninsula/Palo Alto branch in California held a Community Art Project for Hiroshima Day, organized by member Judy Adams. For the 3rd year in a row we partnered with A/V (Art Ventures) gallery in Menlo Park, whose director is a peace activist.
In 2020, volunteers and branch members made over 2,000 paper peace cranes as an art installation inspired by the strands of cranes sent by WILPF US to peace activists in Ehime Prefecture, Japan (see our short video). In 2021, we partnered again with the gallery, with a dedication of a "peace sculpture" of a Torii Peace Gate for the gallery’s Silicon Valley artists exhibit. We helped the artist install 1,000 cranes to the tall wooden gate as she prepared her sculpture to be entered into the gallery’s annual Silicon Valley sculpture exhibition.
Making block prints with artist Yoko Tahara. Photo credit Judy Adams.
This year, local Japanese artist Yoko Tahara submitted a wire and cloth sculpture depicting fish that could be damaged by radioactive elements in water used to cool the Fukushima reactor cores, a process planned for release next spring. Tahra asks the question in her artist's statement, “Will it poison the fish in local and global fishing grounds, and contaminate the human food chain?”
As part of the event, participants used the artist’s hand-carved printing blocks with images of fish and fish skeletons to decorate a long scroll, depicting them floating down an ocean channel. The scroll will be exhibited with Tahara’s sculpture at the gallery.
Scroll, printed by participants, for art exhibitions
