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Newport News-Times, November 12, 2003
Newport Middle School students take part in lanterns for peace project
Students at Newport Middle School are taking part in a project that could bring them international notoriety.
The activity is called Words for Peace and is the brainchild of Thomas Ingmire, a nationally known calligrapher, who started the project in March in response to the "war in Iraq and the ongoing U.S. defiance of the global community," according the wordsforpeace.org website.
Leading the project at NMS is Christie Burns, a Newport calligrapher who has submitted her own work for Ingmire's exhibit and is a former student of his.
The project is designed for participants to make a "visual statement about world peace," according to the website.
Art work is done on 20- by 5-inch strips of paper. The choice of paper, ink and colors are up to the artists. In Kim Taylor's eighth grade language arts class at NMS, students are using supplies provided by Burns.
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See a PDF of the full article in the Newport News-Times
Gallery 1: Students at Newport Middle School participate in Words for Peace
Gallery 2: More pictures of the students at work
Gallery 3: The Words for Peace exhibition in Newport
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San Francisco Chronicle, July 5th 2003
The power of words is enhanced by beauty of the script in calligraphy show
San Francisco calligrapher Thomas Ingmire marched in the anti-war rallies here this spring, but he also wanted to say something in his art about the impending invasion of Iraq.
So, it turned out, did friends and colleagues and strangers around the world. They sent Ingmire more than 400 pieces of calligraphy for "Words for Peace," a potent communal work that's part of Kalligraphia X, an exhibition of all kinds of calligraphy at the San Francisco Public Library.
The 5-by-20-inch pieces in "Words of Peace" -- which range from traditional Asian calligraphy to expressive abstractions to simple anti-war statements spattered with blood red -- have been artfully arranged in 94 hanging lanterns that ring the library's atrium.
"I wanted to fight back with words, to try and show the power of words," said Ingmire, a noted calligrapher and teacher who launched "Words for Peace" after reading about a guy who got busted for trespassing at an upstate New York mall for wearing a T-shirt that said "Peace on Earth."
"I just found that so disheartening that I decided to do this project," said Ingmire, 61, an original member of San Francisco's Friends of Calligraphy,
which puts on the triennial Kalligraphia show. He wrote to friends and students in Europe and Asia asking them to contribute work about war and peace, and to spread the word.
To his surprise, more than 700 calligraphers from 29 countries responded -- pros and amateurs, kids from Italy and Argentina. Two young Italian girls, Marta and Elena, wrote, "Make a love not make a war!!" across a rainbow- colored field.
The famed French calligrapher Jean Larcher wrote "War is" in flowing brushlike red italics and "WRONG" in big bold black letters. Japanese artist Yasuko Tenjukukatsura's shaped the phrase "No War" in sweeping black strokes and Jackson Pollock splatters.
One sees ink-splashed German words that read like abstractions, "Peace" in many languages, images of bombs and oil and glowing green splotches that suggest explosions seen through night-vision lenses. American artist Annie Ciciale offers partially illegible text written over the word WAR, drawn in giant brown letters and intercut in red with a familiar pop lyric: "What is it good for? Absolutely Nothing!" Another piece quotes Homer Simpson: "I'm not normally a praying man, but if you're up there, please save me, Superman."
"There are ones you can read, and others that are difficult to read but are quite expressive as visual marks," said Ingmire, who traces calligraphy -- beautiful writing, in Greek -- back to the marks early people made on rocks and caves.
Working with Betsy Raymond and Kazumi Atsuta, he hit on the idea of forming the pieces into five-sided lanterns (they had a laugh when they saw they'd used the pentagon to speak against war). "The lanterns allowed us to show all the pieces, and they move nicely, and there's that kind of symbolic connection with light and peace and air."
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See the full article on SFGate
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