With hundreds of events taking place in every corner of the globe, World Collage Day is an annual, international celebration of collage on the Second Saturday of May. These were the things we were thinking about when we began our search for the 2022 World Collage Day Poster Artist. Art has all the elements that fight despair: imagination, problem solving, world creation, beauty, humor…the list goes on and on. As artists, we hope what we make will be meaningful to another person.

The human spirit can resist, even in prison.Īt that moment of destruction and creation, art is an act of hope. He was saying to his fellow citizens: Look, they cannot win. He did this because he wanted to show other people that his jailers could not break his spirit, that even in the worst situation he could still make art, that his humanity was still intact, that he held onto hope. When Burmese artist San Zaw Htway was imprisoned by Myanmar’s military dictatorship, he made collage from food wrappers, plastic bags, and other refuse he could find. It demands that we hold on to joy, resist the temptation to give into defeat, and think up new solutions to our problems. Times get better when enough people believe a new way forward is possible. The circumstances of time don’t change on their own. Living through difficult times requires hope. It takes decades for humanity to develop enough perspective to apprehend human events.

And everything between the creation and the next destruction is the journey of life.”Īre we in a period of renewal or are we in a time of crisis? With the ongoing pandemic, corrosive politics, impending climate disaster, and deep social strife, it can certainly feel like we are in the latter, but we don’t know the time we live in. Or as the Indian writer Amish Tripathi said, “Creation and destruction are the two ends of the same moment. The other thing is that the Renaissance would not be possible without the crisis of the Late Middle Ages and the political chaos, plagues, climate change, and famine. The term wasn’t coined until the French historian Jules Michelet wrote about the period in 1855. The thing is, if you were living during that time, you didn’t know it was a Renaissance. A door to human liberation opened by Islamic philosopher Al-Jubba’i nearly five centuries earlier, humanism flourished during the Renaissance and the capacity to understand one’s own humanity expanded exponentially. One of the greatest gifts of that time was a philosophy of humanism and the belief in the agency and potential of human beings. While the focus of that history is on Europe, the wealth and knowledge that made the Renaissance possible came from Asia, Africa, the Islamic World, and the Americas. The Renaissance was an amazing time, a profound leap forward in art, architecture, philosophy, literature, music, science…nearly all aspects of human endeavour. WORLD COLLAGE DAY 2022 Announcing the 2022 World Collage Day Poster Artist Joy and Jubilee by Erin McCluskey Wheelerĭiptych: 22″x15″ each found and painted paper, acrylic, gouache, ink, pencil on watercolor paper 2018.

Word shape collage