(Dream) Roads to Home and Peace
Crossing Cultures in Times of Conflict through Art, Music, and Poetry 

Have you ever thought about the power of music during difficult times? How do songs provide comfort, hope or even a voice for change in moments of conflict? What song or poem inspires you to keep going?

Join us on Tuesday, December 3, 5:30-7:30pm for a unique event dedicated to exploring the profound impact of music in times of struggle. Mason Exhibitions and the Korean ArtPop Storytelling Workshop Team invite the International community at Mason for an uplifting event surrounded by the exhibition A Closer Look: Conflicted Art from Ukraine.

We’ll begin with experiencing the Korean art song ‘Dream Road’, performed by the Korean ArtPop Storytelling Workshop Team. Following the music, we’ll engage in an open dialogue in which we encourage you to share pieces of music and poems. As a community, we will collectively build the playlist “Dream Roads to Home and Peace” to carry forward the message of connection.

This event is offered in collaboration with The Narrative Transformation Lab.

Join Mason Exhibitions and the Alan Cheuse International Writers Center on November 15, 6-8pm at Mason Exhibitions Arlington for a book launch of two authors, Megan Doney's Unarmed: An American Educator's Memoir  and Amanda Newell, Postmortem Say.

This event is in collaboration with Faces and Figures: Identity Through Printmaking Between South Africa and DC. Themes of the exhibition respond to violence, reconciliation, and the spirit of Ubuntu (I am because we are).

Mason Exhibitions Arlington is located at 3601 Fairfax Drive, Arlington VA, across the street from the Virginia Square Metro station, and paid street parking is available.

Please email Alissa Maru with questions/concerns (mailto: amaru@gmu.edu)
Free and Open to the Public

About the Books

Unarmed: An American Educator's Memoir

After surviving a school shooting, English professor Megan Doney was traumatized and adrift. Rather than hardening her heart and life, she wrote Unarmed: An American Educator's Memoir. An insightful response to American gun violence and illusions of public and private safety, this memoir is about how to live with an open heart, alive to luck, learning, and love.

Postmortem Say

Love and death, poetry's immortal themes, are interwoven throughout Amanda Newell's Postmortem Say. Death is everywhere-in the fields and forests, on darkened roads, in the delivery room-but there is also love, the kind that defies convention and outlasts death itself. These poems confront, without flinching, hard truths about what it means to be a woman, a mother, a wife, and a lover.

-Sue Ellen Thompson, author of Sea Nettles: New & Selected Poems

Andriy Ivanovych Dubchak (b. 1976) is a Ukrainian photographer, videographer, photojournalist, and war correspondent. Dubchak is the founder and director of the independent reporting media outlet Donbas Frontliner.

Andriy’s work is featured in A Closer Look: Conflicted Art from Ukraine at Buchanan Hall Atrium Gallery.

This event will be held online only! RSVP is required to receive the link via email the day-of!

Nora Krug is a German-American author and illustrator whose drawings and visual narratives have appeared in newspapers, magazines and anthologies internationally. In September 2023, Krug published Diaries of War: Two Visual Accounts from Ukraine and Russia.

Immediately after Russia began its unprovoked invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Nora Krug reached out to two anonymous subjects — “K.,” a Russia-born Ukrainian journalist, and “D.,” a Russian artist — and began what would become a year of correspondence. Based on her weekly interviews with K. and D., Krug created this collection of illustrated accounts that chronicles two viewpoints from opposite sides of the border throughout the first year in this ongoing war.

This event will be held in Harris Theater on the GMU Fairfax campus and online via Zoom. RSVP is required to receive the link via email the day-of!

Diaries of War: Two Visual Accounts from Ukraine and Russia will be for sale at the event, and a book signing will be held in the lobby afterwards!

Kei Ito (b. 1991) is an interdisciplinary installation artist working primarily with photographic media and sculpture. Ito’s photographs are fundamentally rooted in the trauma and legacy passed down from his late grandfather, a survivor of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, and the loss of many other family members from the explosion and subsequent radiation poisoning. His work meditates on the complexity of his identity and heritage and seeks to visualize invisible forces such as radiation, memory, and human mortality.

This event will be held at the Center for the Arts Concert Hall on the GMU Fairfax campus and online via Zoom. RSVP is required to receive the link via email the day-of!