CityArts!

began its work in 1992, with a summer camp assembled

by a handful of neighborhood social service agencies, families,
and community leaders. Te camp was an initial response to the
communitys critical need for positive programs to engage youth
during out-of-school time. Tis need persists and signifcant demand
for CityArts! programs has resulted in year-round afterschool and
summer classes which now serve over 1500 youth annually. Today, in
addition to working with local artists and educators, CityArts! youth
have exceptional opportunities to take feld trips to local museums,
perform at community gatherings, receive homework help from
students attending our partner universities, engage in neighborhood service projects, and have their work displayed
in galleries throughout Providence!
Te Center for Mediation, Peace and Resolution of Confict
(CEMPROC) is a nonproft organization based in Cumming, GA,
USA; and Quito, Ecuador with the ultimate purpose of reducing
confict in Latin America. It was founded in 2003 by Jefrey Pugh,
who serves as its Executive Director. CEMPROCs leadership also
includes a Director for Ecuador, Omar Rodriguez. Te organization
is governed by an International Board of Directors in consultation
with a local Board of Directors in Ecuador, which oversees the Ecuador branch. CEMPROC ofers training and
educational programs, mediation services, and consulting, especially for marginalized areas in the developing world
and among immigrant communities in the United States, building local capacity in peaceful confict resolution and
mediation.
Professor Eric Sung, Assistant Professor of Photography
Dr. Jefrey Pugh, Assistant Professor of Political Science & Executive Director of CEMPROC
Dr. Nicholas Longo, Director of Global Studies & Associate Professor of Public and Community Service
Dr. Nicholas Longo
Director of Global Studies
Associate Professor of Public and Community Service
Ive always had an interest in the role art can play in building community, and even used
photography in a few urban leadership courses I taught for inner city high school students in
St. Paul, Minnesota while I was a graduate student. Ive never had any artistic backgroundor
talentso Im pretty limited in my ability to teach a course like this. My wife, Aleida, is the
community-based art educator in our family. But when Professor Eric Sung and I started at
Providence College in 2008, we had a lot of chances to talk about our mutual interests and desire to
teach a service-learning course together. Hes such a committed teacher and unbelievably talented
photographer that I jumped at the chance to teach with him. So we decided to pilot the course
last year with Chandelle Wilson, a young community leader, as our community partner, and that
was really a transformational teaching experience for me, so I was excited to build on what we did
last year. We decided to incorporate an international component into the course to make it more
global, but struggled to fnd the right international partner until we talked with Professor Jef Pugh,
a new faculty member who specializes in confict resolution in Latin America and actually founded the non-proft we partnered with in
Ecuador, CEMPROC. He was interested in connecting PC students with his work in Ecuador so we decided to connect our two courses
around the theme of Visualizing Peace and Justice with a spring break trip to Ecuador.
Ive learned that art isnt just something you go passively look at hanging on the walls of a museum; it is also something we can all be part
of creating. As a result, Im most interested in the way art and photography are not only part of a community, but also helps to build
community. Tings like community murals or community photography projects, for instance, bring diverse people together to create
something that is sustainable and has real, public value. Tat, to me, is how art is connected to service, and it needs to be the fabric of
just about every vibrant community and this project can play a small part in making that happen in South Providence, in Ecuador, and at
Providence College.
Peace and justice are ideals that we all strive to promote, but art and service (especially when they are connected) give us a way to put our
beliefs in these ideals in practice. Te visual processthe taking, editing, and exhibiting of photographs in our classalso adds a unique
dimension to our understanding of peace and justice as images convey powerful meanings that often cannot be expressed with words.
Finally, and this is really important to me, the act of collaborating with youth in Providence and in Ecuador in the making of art is in
itself a peacemaking process. We are using photography to cross boundaries in peaceful ways, making new connections, and becoming
(hopefully) an embodiment of the peace and justice we hope to see in the world.
Dr. Jefrey Pugh
Assistant Professor of Political Science
Executive Director of Center for Mediation, Peace, and Resolution of Confict (CEMPROC)
I value interdisciplinary scholarship and teaching for its potential to push students to think creatively
and confront questions in new ways. Since I have run study abroad programs in Ecuador for fve
years and led a nonproft organization there for nine years, I was already planning to integrate an
international experience in Ecuador into my PC teaching. Last year, I started talking with Professors
Nick Longo and Eric Sung, and discovered that they were also interested in developing a course-
based program that would include a Latin America/Ecuador component. It made sense to coordinate
our eforts to form a joint course-embedded international education program, which we entitled
Visualizing Peace and Justice in Ecuador. I see this program as an important step forward as we
develop innovative models of international education at PC, expanding the ways in which students
can become global citizens.
I have had a chance to learn a lot about and to think more deeply about how photography connects
with peace, justice, and service to community (including a much larger global community). For me, one of the primary ways that
photography and art can help to foster peace and community and to promote social change is their power to express emotions, ideas, and
tap into common experiences to move people in ways that words alone are incapable of doing. In other words, art as a product or outcome
has consequences on social relations among those who view it. A second way in which art, peace, and community are linked is in the actual
process of creating the art. In many cases, people and groups who have been in confict or who do not trust each other may be empowered
by sharing together in the construction of something beautiful. Tis gives a public voice or message to their emotions, recognizes and
validates their personal experiences, and creates a space to imagine (together) a diferent and hopefully better community. Art can overcome
diferences in ethnic or ideological groups, language, and age, and in our trip to Ecuador, I saw art become a catalyst for greater cross-
cultural interaction and understanding, and an expansion of our conception of community.
In Ecuador, we explored how art, in its many forms, can express universal messages of solidarity, love, understanding, community, and
nonviolence in ways that transcend the limitations of language and words. From dance being used as a tool to empower women who have
been the victims of abuse and allow them a safe space to support each other and express their vision, to street art as a more constructive
alternative to violent youth gangs for claiming public spaces and demanding a voice, to improv theater together with 10-year-old peace
promoters, the Ecuador program allowed students to experience directly the power of art as a medium for change. Photography served as a
visual product to document the process of the many activities during the week, as well as being integral to the process of sharing experiences
with youth, community members in the indigenous village where we lived, and with many other community partners that we met during
the week. Trough the course-embedded components in Providence, students engaged in service-learning at CityArts, local schools, and
other local community partners, where they also explored the ways in which photography and other arts can foster a sense of community
and build peace.
Professor Eric Sung
Assistant Professor of Photography
As an artist, I like making art that deals with broader ideas than the art making itself. Especially for
a photographer, since we often depend so heavily on seeing and reacting to what we see, I attempt to
introduce opportunities for our students to see their surroundings beyond the studio space so they
react by taking a picture and then analyzing the image. Prior to arriving at PC, I worked with a
rehabilitation facility in Hammond, LA. I brought eight students and we taught residents from the
facility to photograph so they could show us their world instead of telling us about it. Tis was such
a powerful and positive project for all of us involved. Soon after arriving to PC, I ofered a service-
learning course with Professor Cemal Ekin. For this course, we partnered with the Gloria Gemma
Foundation for Breast Cancer to create greater awareness for breast cancer by creating a photography
exhibition. As I was learning more about teaching service-learning, I was fortunate to meet Professor
Nick Longo. Soon after having a conversation with him, we started to design our frst team-taught
course Community Lens. Teaching a course with Nick and our community partner, Chandelle
Wilson, was such an eye-opening experience for me. I was so impressed to see the power and
the long-lasting impact of a successful interdisciplinary course. Nick and I both decided to ofer this course again with an international
component added. In the process of working with many moving parts to design the Global Community Lens course, Professor Jefery
Pugh joined us. Jefs scholarly and personal experience with Ecuador and his interest in integrating an international experience in his
teaching brought all of us together. It has been such an empowering experience for me to witness Nick, Jef, and Chandelles teaching and
to be a member of the teaching team for this course.
Photography has been a favorite medium by many artists who make art with political and social concerns. Te possibility of mass
reproduction and the ease of conveying messages are two of many reasons why it has been favored over other media. However, art,
including photography can give a voice to the people who cannot be heard otherwise. Tis visual voice can reach the greater public
beyond the physical limitations more than ever before thanks to the internet. Photography enables us to communicate, share, and possibly
understand one another. Art is a product of an idea. Trough making, viewing, and sharing art that discusses an idea such as peace
and justice, this fragile idea gains a frm shape. It is not a single photograph that can show the concept of peace and justice; it happens
when there are multiple images that show multiple and complex dimensions of it. Also, as we make images and share them among us, we
naturally create a dialogue with the concept of peace and justice embedded in the action of making and sharing images.
Group Photo at CityArts
Lauren Begasse 12
Samantha Bergbauer 12
Sarah Davey 12
Meryl Ertelt 13
Alexandra Finn-Atkins 12
Kara Flanagan 14
Matthew Gendron 12
Kari Hardgrove 12
Colleen Hayes 13
Jessica Ho 14
Liesl Huber 12
Daniel Kowalsky 12
Emma Lane 14
Kiley Leduc 14
Katrina Lipinsky 12
Debra Lombardi 15
Kathryn McCann 12
Katherine Nolan 14
David OConnor 14
Claire Street 14
Rachel Wall 12
Joamm Abrey
Rafael Agudelo
Darwin Aguiar
Victor Aguiar
Genesis Cohen
Ronald Coste
Angela Dasilva
Neomy DeLaCruz
Richard DeLaCruz
Pena Diosmary
Pena Diosy
Chelsea Gomez
Jefrey Gutierrez
Danilo Hernandez
Rosamond Ibitoye
Julius Merchant
Stephanie Montilla
Jazmin Morillon
Brian Nunez
Emmanuek Oliveros
Erika Perez
John Salazar
Rosario Sanlatte
Abigail Tamburino
Eli Tamburino
Group Photo at Ecuador in the Middle of the World
Group Photo with Nicolas Herrera (artist), Jorge Luis Narvaez (flm-maker) and
Omar Rodriguez (director of CEMPROC, Ecuador) in Ibarra, Ecuador
Te Institute for the Study and Practice of Nonviolence has a mission to teach, by word
and example, the principles and practices of nonviolence, and to foster a community
that addresses potentially violent situations with nonviolent solutions. We work to build
Dr. Martin Luther Kings ideal of the nonviolent Beloved Community. Rec Night,
one of the programs ofered through the Institute, is a collaborative efort to provide the
youth of Smith Hill and surrounding neighborhoods a safe environment to just be kids.
Te idea for Rec Night was frst identifed by former Institute for the Study and Practice
of Nonviolence, Streetworker, Tou Pathoummahong. A group comprised of interested
neighborhood residents, elected ofcials and volunteers from Providence College and various community groups
has coalesced around this vision. Te core team members are Smith Hill Community Development Corporation,
Institute for the Study and Practice of Nonviolence, Providence College and the Providence Department of Parks
and Recreation. Te Providence Police Department also plays a critical support role.
Te students who participated in the Visualizing Peace and Justice Exhibit would like to extend a special
thanks to the many contributors for the extensive support we received that provided for the success of our
project.
We would like to thank:
Center for Mediation, Peace, and Resolution of Confict (CEMPROC) for their hospitality and
resources provided in Ecuador and throughout the semester
CityArts! for their continued support and partnership
Te Department of Art and Art History for the use of their facilities and materials
Te Feinstein Institute for Public Service for funds provided for the project
Te Institute for the Study and Practice of Nonviolence for their continued support of our
project and ability to work with the Rec Night Program
PDQ Printing & Design, Inc. for their assistance in the printing of this publication
Providence College for their support of our project
Santander Universities for providing the resources that made our project possible