As COVID-19 and calls for racial justice roil the nation, the Peace Studio, a project co-founded by Hawaii educator and activist Maya Soetoro-Ng, is calling on artists and creatives to calm the mind and inspire peaceful solutions to those and other world problems.
The project, called 100 Offerings of Peace, has commissioned 100 contributors to create presentations in a variety of artistic genres, ranging from music, dance and visual arts to readings and meditations, that are intended to motivate people into taking action to build peace, teach empathy and kindness and bring about social justice. The offerings have been rolled out one a day since July 1 on the organization’s website, thepeacestudio.org/100- offerings-of-peace, and will continue until until Nov. 1.
Many of the offerings are from established artists, including renowned cellist Yo-Yo Ma and award-winning playwright Sarah Ruhl, but others are from emerging artists, who were selected from a rigorous screening process. Several contributions came from Hawaii-based artists.
“Hopefully those new voices will inspire new conversations and we can begin seeing opportunites for new stories and creativity and innovation in our own hale and our own backyards and communities, and rediscover the many voices we have access to,” said Soetoro-Ng, who has been staying home in Manoa during the pandemic.
Soetoro-Ng is the half-sister of former president and Nobel Peace Prize winner Barack Obama, but she is a longtime peace activist in her own right, having served on the faculty of the Spark M. Matsunaga Institute for Peace and Conflict Resolution at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. She also taught social studies at La Pietra – Hawaii School for Girls and the University Laboratory School in Honolulu, as well as schools in New York.
Peace building was always part of her motivation behind teaching, she said. She remembers asking her students to look at what kind of legacy they would want to leave behind and applied that thought to her own legacy, particularly in terms of contributing to peace.
“People often see peace as kind of nice, ideal, a great idea, a sweet thought, but they really didn’t see their own responsibility, their own kuleana, their own potential to impact peace and conflict,” she said. “I really saw the need to ‘rebrand’ peace as pragmatic, as action-oriented, as part of everyone’s kuleana. I thought that my goal in all of this is helping people know where to enter this dream and how to create more peace in their own lives and communities.
“Peace is not just the absence of war and conflict, but it is the presence and participation of all of us in moving the world and making it more just for all of us.”
She established the Peace Studio in 2017 with Todd Shuster and Jennifer Gates of Aevitas Creative Management, a top literary agency based in New York. They have pursued projects like a 2019 theater program for young American and Rwandan artists in remembrance of the Rwandan genocide, a leadership summit for peace activists in 2018 and a leadership conference in 2017.
HAWAII contributed five offerings to the Peace Studio, with project administrators praising the range and quality of the talent coming from the islands.
“I think it’s one of the highest amounts of representation for a state,” said Thomas West, executive director of the Peace Studio, “and that wasn’t necessarily just because Maya’s from Hawaii. It’s that we had so many amazing proposals from Hawaii. It was actually really hard to choose.”
One of the Hawaii contributors, Baz Cumberbatch, is a self-trained Maui-based “eco” artist who uses flora from the islands to creates landscapes and sculptural pieces. For the Peace Studio, he used banana leaves and palm fronds to create an oceanscape called “From the Sky to the Sea.”
“I collected them from different places on Maui, some from high elevations, some from low elevations,” he said, explaining the name of his work. It appeared on the Peace Studio’s website on Aug. 14 as the 45th offering.
A native of the Caribbean nation of St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Cumberbatch first arrived in Hawaii to pursue windsurfing — he had been a champion windsurfer in the Caribbean — and art, with acrylic painting as his preferred medium. His turn to eco art was inspired by a trip to cold-weather Alaska and his return to Maui, where he began to visualize landscapes in branches, bark and leaves.
“I found mountain shapes in the natural pieces,” he said, “and the mountains looked like the trees that I grew up with, which were banana trees.”
While the materials for his work were collected on Maui, he actually created it in Evanston, Ill., a part-time residence where he chose to stay during the pandemic. He has received recognition in Chicago’s noted art scene, having had work exhibited at the Museum of Science and Industry. His work was part of the Black Creativity Juried Art Exhibition.
He said his work is to encourage people to “Go out in nature. Be quiet, listen and breathe for at least 30 minutes, hopefully, more. Pay attention to nature. She is the teacher.”
Loretta Chen, an adjunct theater professor at Leeward Community College, is another Hawaii-based creative whose work will soon appear in the Peace Studio lineup. A director, author and filmmaker who had an acclaimed career in her native Singapore, she has lived in Hawaii Kai for four years, after coming to the islands on a stopover to the mainland and finding beauty, happiness — and a husband — in short order.
Her offering to the Peace Studio is “My Little Red Dot,” a beautifully animated film based on a short story written by brother Edmund, a well-known actor in Singapore and an accomplished artist. The story is about a little fish “who never fit in,” Chen said. “He has a little red patch over his eye and he always felt discriminated against and left out. … So he goes out of his depth to find himself.
She is especially pleased that the film is a family project, working across the ocean. “My brother did the artwork, my nephew did the illustration, my niece did the voiceover, and then my sister and I did the voiceover for some of the other characters, and then I did the writing,” she said.
“The narrative is a peace offering, but it’s a narrative it’s about finding peace within as well as peace without, which to me is one of the biggest causes of our divisiveness,” she said. “People are so inherently unhappy. If we can’t find peace within, it’s hard to find peace without.”
The Peace Studio
100 Offerings of Peace, created in response to COVID-19 and racial injustice, introduced daily from July 1-Nov. 1, on thepeacestudio.org/ 100-offerings-of-peace.
Hawaii-based contributors
>> Baz Cumberbatch: “From the Sky to the Sea” (offering No. 45)
Upcoming
>> Loretta Chen: short film “My Little Red Dot”
>> Noah Kneeream-Lapian: visual art
>> Gregory Loui: literary offering
>> Sheila Walters Matsuda: guided meditation
