Happy October! We’re excited to announce that the Academy for Peace and Justice has officially opened for Fall 2014 with 2,600 students, bringing us even closer to our goal of serving 3,000 students by 2016. On our latest trip to the Academy of Peace and Justice, Headmaster Antoine Edy, shared with us why he is so excited for this new school year:

“When I go back to school I am very happy. The most exciting thing is seeing all the kids, especially the new faces!”

Antoine Edy has been our Headmaster at the Academy for Peace and Justice since the very beginning, when all we had was a piece of land and a dream to build a free high school for the very poor. Before APJ, Headmaster Edy worked as a Spanish teacher at another secondary school in Haiti that was tragically destroyed by the 7.0 magnitude earthquake in 2010.

“We have many very hardworking students.” says Headmaster Edy, and he’s right! APJ schools are excellent. 95% of Academy students passed Haiti’s national exams with flying colors for the past two years in a row!

Headmaster Edy is a positive role model to our students, a friendly face on campus, and central community member.  He believes in the power of education to change a nation—and so do we!

“Please help us to continue to grow as our students grow,” says Headmaster Edy. “Each day discovering the joy and pride that comes with acquiring knowledge. Knowledge that will allow them to truly change their world, to endow them with the dignity and the tools to remake and rebuild their country.”

45+ top contemporary artists. Four days. Extraordinary impact. Opening October 22, 2014 at Pace Gallery, FIERCE CREATIVITY is a selling exhibition benefitting Artists for Peace and Justice.  We are blown away by the enormous talent and artistic vision of our curators and 49 participating artists and their commitment to education as a fundamental human right. APJ Advisory Board Members and curators of FIERCE CREATIVITY, meet Chuck Close and Jessica Craig-Martin.

“When every kid on the block wanted to become a policeman or fireman, I wanted to be an artist. It was the first thing that I was good at, the first thing that really made me special. I had skills the other kids didn’t have,” says Chuck Close in his biography Up Close (1998). “Art saved my life.”

Chuck Close is a visual artist noted for his highly inventive techniques used to paint the human face, and is best known for his large-scale, photo-based portrait paintings. He is also an accomplished printmaker and photographer whose work has been the subject of more than 200 solo exhibitions in more than 20 countries, including major retrospective exhibitions at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid and most recently at the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia. An award winning artist, Mr. Close was presented with the prestigious National Medal of Arts by President Clinton in 2000.  Close is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was appointed by President Obama to serve on The President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities.

“For us Artists for Peace and Justice is different,” say Craig-Martin and Close in the FIERCE CREATIVITY Catalog’s opening letter. “We’ve both been directly involved in APJ and know the work first hand. APJ is focused on results. There’s no big bureaucracy and no exorbitant administrative costs. At APJ we see vital schools that grow each year with more buildings, improved programs and increased scholarships.”

Jessica Craig-Martin has been a professor of photography at the School of Visual Arts for 10 years. Her work is in the permanent collections of The Guggenheim Museum, New York, The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, The New Museum, New York, and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid. Her editorial photography has been featured in publications including Vogue, Vanity Fair, W Magazine, The New Yorker, Self Service, The New York Times Magazine, Purple, NOWNESS, Italian Vogue, and Bald Ego. She is currently writing a book about her experiences growing up in the art worlds of New York and London.

“Our actions today, in this bold new world, require us more than ever to act together, to use our voices and our talents to help usher progress and solutions forward. We must do so quite fiercely, if we are to make a real difference.”

Please join Chuck Close, Jessica Craig-Martin, and Artists for Peace and Justice on October 22, 2014 for the opening reception of FIERCE CREATIVITY at New York City’s Pace Gallery.

We’ve got water! Everyone knows that in developing countries throughout the world, access to clean water is a game changer. Even on our beautiful campus by the sea, we had trouble providing reliable, clean drinking water to our staff and students. Since Artists Institute is built on the edge of a cliff,  everyone told us we’d never hit water drilling a well, just rock. Everyone thought it couldn’t be done. So we were forced to adapt and have water delivered from town to our campus on trucks twice a week, every week, for the past five years. Whether for drinking, cooking, bathing, or basic sanitation, clean water can help. This past week with the help of our friends at Waves for Water, we successfully drilled a well on our campus in Jacmel, providing Artists Institute access to fresh, clean drinking water!

Jon Rose, founder of Waves for Water, is an old friend of Ciné Institute and its founder David Belle, now our CEO here at Artists for Peace and Justice. Rose and Belle worked together to distribute food, water filters, and general aid in the wake of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. When Jon and his team heard our community in Jacmel needed clean water, he did not hesitate to help. Two days later, we struck big.

Waves for Water (W4W) have a simple mission: get clean water to every single person who needs it.  W4W founder Jon Rose says, “In my opinion, the Artists Institute truly represents the new paradigm in Haiti. It’s an environment that gives the next generation a real opportunity for a brighter future. In conjunction with APJ, we at Waves For Water are honored to help support their amazing program, by providing a new fresh water well.”

With Haiti’s population of nearly 10 million people, 70% of the population does not have access to safe drinking water, and totally avoidable waterborne diseases such as typhoid, cholera, and chronic diarrhea claim half the nation’s deaths each year.  Clean water is an issue that some times feels overlooked, but organizations like W4W are doing something about it. On behalf of all of our staff and students, we can’t wait to put this much-needed well to good use!  Thank you Waves for Water!