{"id":2707,"date":"2016-04-11T22:36:51","date_gmt":"2016-04-12T02:36:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mjsymuleski.com\/artofthemooc\/?p=2707"},"modified":"2016-04-11T23:41:03","modified_gmt":"2016-04-12T03:41:03","slug":"murals-in-gaza-for-water-crisis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjsymuleski.com\/artofthemooc\/murals-in-gaza-for-water-crisis\/","title":{"rendered":"Murals in Gaza for Water Crisis"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>&#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/maiamuralproject.org\/\">A delegation of US artists traveled to the Gaza Strip<\/a> earlier this summer to paint 10 collaborative murals (8 completed, 2 still in process) in several places around Gaza, with multi-fold intentions of bringing attention to the water and environmental crises faced by the 1.6 million Palestinians trapped inside and to build relationships between communities in the US and in Palestine.<\/p>\n<p>Organizing the <a href=\"http:\/\/maiamuralproject.org\/\">Maia Mural Project<\/a>, Dr. Susan Greene \u2014 a San Francisco Bay Area-based Palestine solidarity activist and artist\/co-founder of the <a href=\"http:\/\/breakthesilencearts.org\/\">Break the Silence Mural and Arts project<\/a> in Palestine and the <a href=\"http:\/\/olympiarafahmural.org\/\">Olympia-Rafah Solidarity Mural Project<\/a> (ORSMP) \u2014 told The Electronic Intifada that\u00a0the goal of the project was to build across movements and get people there who haven\u2019t been there before, and weren\u2019t necessarily connected to the Palestinian issue to begin with.<\/p>\n<p>The mural project was born of a collaboration between several US arts and activism organizations, including the<a href=\"http:\/\/www.estria.org\/\">Estria Foundation<\/a>, the ORSMP, and the <a href=\"http:\/\/mecaforpeace.org\/\">Middle East Children\u2019s Alliance<\/a> (MECA) \u2014 which has been raising funds to employ local organizations in Gaza to build much-needed water purification and desalination systems for Palestinian schoolchildren <a href=\"http:\/\/mecaforpeace.org\/project\/maia-project\">via their Maia project<\/a> (<em>maia<\/em> means \u201cwater\u201d in Arabic). MECA says they have helped provide water systems to 14 large UN schools in Palestinian refugee camps and to 13 kindergartens in refugee camps, towns, and villages.<\/p>\n<p>(\u201cThese graffiti artists were fantastic,\u201d said Greene. \u201cThey were already great at community mural work where they live, and came to Gaza to paint these huge walls in areas where Maia water purification systems had been set up with funds raised by MECA. I was blown away. They were my mentors. They had a lot of help from people and kids from the community \u2014 including strong Gazan artists who work in aerosol. They worked with 30 artists in Rafah for a mural that\u2019s still in progress now.\u201d)&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>-The Electronic Intifada<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&#8220;A delegation of US artists traveled to the Gaza Strip earlier this summer to paint 10 collaborative murals (8 completed, 2 still in process) in several places around Gaza, with multi-fold intentions of bringing attention to the water and environmental crises faced by the 1.6 million Palestinians trapped inside and to build relationships between communities &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/mjsymuleski.com\/artofthemooc\/murals-in-gaza-for-water-crisis\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Murals in Gaza for Water Crisis&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":944,"featured_media":2708,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,8],"tags":[],"coauthors":[564],"class_list":["post-2707","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-activism-and-social-movements","category-modules"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjsymuleski.com\/artofthemooc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2707","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjsymuleski.com\/artofthemooc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjsymuleski.com\/artofthemooc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjsymuleski.com\/artofthemooc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/944"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjsymuleski.com\/artofthemooc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2707"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mjsymuleski.com\/artofthemooc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2707\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2709,"href":"https:\/\/mjsymuleski.com\/artofthemooc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2707\/revisions\/2709"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjsymuleski.com\/artofthemooc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2708"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjsymuleski.com\/artofthemooc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2707"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjsymuleski.com\/artofthemooc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2707"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjsymuleski.com\/artofthemooc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2707"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjsymuleski.com\/artofthemooc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=2707"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}