Ross Bleckner - Welcome to Gulu
New York Artist’s Exhibition Highlights UN Mission in Uganda
May 21, 2009
In January 2009, Ross Bleckner travelled to Uganda to work with former child soldiers and abductees in art therapy. The exhibition Welcome to Gulu showcases works resulting from Bleckner’s UN mission, which saw the celebrated New York artist mentoring 25 teenagers and young adults who as children had been kidnapped and forced into combat or sexual slavery during the longstanding violent civil strife in northern Uganda.
The mission was organised by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, the lead UN agency addressing human trafficking globally.
Bleckner on Loss
A native of Long Island, Bleckner first came to prominence in the heady New York art scene of the 1980s. Bleckner’s distinctive abstract paintings have been displayed at the Guggenheim, Whitney and Museum of Modern Art in New York, and are prized in collections around the world. For the last twenty years, Bleckner has been teaching studio art in such prestigious institutions as Columbia, Harvard and, currently, NYU's Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development.
Bleckner has long been known for his charity and activist work in the fight against AIDS, becoming president of AIDS Community Research Initiative of America (ACRIA) over a decade ago.
Concepts of death, disease and loss have had enormous impact on his painting. Many of Bleckner’s later works detail diseased or cancerous cells, transformatively expressing the unknowable fragility of life in compositions at once thematically chilling and aesthetically warm. Bleckner was uniquely capable of bringing this particular mix of inquisitiveness and sensitivity to the United Nations project.
“Only an artist as visionary and compassionate as Mr. Bleckner could allow the victims to express themselves so eloquently,” said UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon at the opening of the exhibition May 12 at UN headquarters in New York.
Lehmann Maupin Gallery Exhibition
Following the gala UN opening on the 12th, which was attended by several celebrities including Nicolas Cage, Alec Baldwin and Antoine Fuqua, the exhibition moved to the renowned New York fine arts gallery Lehmann Maupin, where it opened May 15 and will be on view until June 13.
Proceeds from the sale of the paintings – as well as portraits done by Bleckner – go to support abductees in the fight to eradicate human trafficking led by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.
The issue of modern slavery in strife-torn African nations has been gaining a higher public profile thanks to projects such as Bleckner’s, as well as best selling books like Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Ishmael Beah and Jimmie Briggs’ Innocents Lost: When Child Soldiers Go To War.
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