COLORING WAR
Fall 2025

A socially engaged art project that offers the Washington D.C. residents a multi-week process of communal art-making to engage with the War in Ukraine. In a gallery in the West End, large painting surfaces will be constructed and mounted on adjacent walls. These surfaces will be primed and prepared as expansive color-by-numbers, where participants can fill in the artworks using provided materials. The paintings depict scenes from the Russian invasion of Ukraine, provided by a network of Ukrainian artists established as part of my organization, Conflicted Art. Participants will use typical children’s art supplies, such as crayons, Crayola markers, and colored pencils, labeled to the corresponding numbered sections on the panels. Employing this methodical process to create violent wartime imagery inherently juxtaposes the childhood innocence symbolized in the art materials. The proximity of ‘war’ to ‘children’ in this project creates an almost inescapable tension that forces participants to confront the implications of lost innocence during armed conflicts. Furthermore, the large paintings, roughly six by eight feet, comprise a series of four to six panels, which allows the works to be deconstructed and transferred to other exhibition spaces.