The Exhibition Hello, Dear Enemy! and the Power of Collaboration

Abstract

The Exhibition Hello, Dear Enemy!and the Power of Collaboration Elliott Schreiber (bio) In the summer of 2016, on a research fellowship at the International Youth Library (IYL) in Munich, Germany, I was fortunate to see the IYL's exhibition Hello, Dear Enemy! Picture Books for Peace and Humanity. By then, Germany had taken in over a million refugees, many from war zones in Syria and Afghanistan. Munich had opened its doors to tens of thousands of asylum seekers. But shrill, nationalist voices in Europe, including in Germany, as well as in the UnitedStates, were calling for these doors to be closed.By contrast, the sixty picturebooks collected in the exhibit, together with the forty graphically stunning posters and banners, cast a humane light on the plight of civilians in conflict zones around the world as well as on wrenching experiences of displacement. I inquired into the possibility of bringing the exhibit to my home institution, Vassar College, a private liberal arts college in Poughkeepsie, New York. I learned that I was not the first representative from a US institution to express such an interest: the director of Worlds of Words (University of Arizona) as well as the HumanRights Institute at the University of Connecticut had also reached out to the IYL. The ensuing partnership between our institutions and the IYL laid the groundwork for a US tour of Hello, Dear Enemy! that began in fall 2017 and recently concluded. Click for larger view View full resolution The origins of this exhibit, in 1998, were based on the awareness that the effects of war, hostility, destruction, and suffering impact all people and children, whether directly as victims of conflict or indirectly as those within countries to which those affected escape. Likewise, the predominance of these topics in the media and in political and social discussions prompts inquisitive minds to question. At the International Youth Library, the belief is that picturebooks dealing with conflict and escape can "provoke reflection and inspire dialogue that sensitizes readers to processes of exclusion and invites them jointly to reflect on the foundations for a peaceful future" (Raabe 57). Thus, in 1998 a collection of books on peace and tolerance was sent to the IBBY Congress in New Delhi, which led to the creation a few years later of the exhibition Hello [End Page 89] Dear Enemy! Picture Books for Peace and Tolerance. The fall of 2014, amidst global crises bringing the topic of refugees and borders to the forefront, found the curators at the International Youth Library updating the exhibit in terms of content, staging design, and a name change: Hello, Dear Enemy! Picture Books for Peace and Humanity. Sixty picturebooks published mainly in the last fifteen years are divided into four themes: "the concrete experiences of war and escape; the causes of war and violence; xenophobia and prejudice; and peace utopias" (Raabe 57). Click for larger view View full resolution Each of the institutions involved in the US tour of this exhibition invested a great deal of time and energy to ensure that it achieved maximum visibility and impact. When Vassar hosted Hello, Dear Enemy! during our spring semester of 2018, we found that the key to achieving this goal was to bring to the local level the kind of collaborative work that we had already begun at a national and international level. At Vassar, I had two principal partners: Tracey Holland, a fellow faculty member with expertise in the area of the human rights of children and the faculty director of the Vassar College Urban Education Initiative, and Thomas Pacio, the director of Vassar's Creative Arts across the Disciplines (CAAD), which provided the financial resources (through the generous support of the Helen Forster Novy 1928 Fund) as well as crucial logistical support. Working closely with other colleagues, we displayed the exhibit at Vassar and two other local venues, and we devised a semester-long course for Vassar students that was structured around the exhibition. Within the framework of our course, we also hosted a celebrated team of artists and conducted significant outreach to seven Poughkeepsie-area schools. Click for larger view View full resolution The principal goal of our course was to...