Seattle-Tehran Remix - A Collaborative Poster Show

I have always enjoyed DCP so much because readers and contributers have such an appreciation and gift for music, dance, painting, writing and other creative arts as well as being informed, compassionate and dedicated about domestic politics and foreign policy of our world. So today I am posting something that I hope is a break from war talk and the distraction of an increasingly ugly domestic political season.

The Seattle-Tehran Poster Show Remix showed at Bumbershoot in Seattle over Labor Day weekend and selections will hang this fall at Verite Coffee Seattle locations. I visited it and photographed some pieces and context.

The websites are SeattleTehran or Design Commission and also Verite Coffee. This show is very close to my heart because I have had such wonderful Iranian friends and always wanted to visit there until things got all messed up. People talk about "nuking Iran" (even a Presidential candidate jokes about it) but probably don't know that we helped overthrow their democratically-elected leader. We then installed the Shah, who was overthrown because he was intolerably cruel, and in the anarchy which followed, fundamentalism was allowed to rise. We shouldn't be so smug as we seem to be a stone's throw away from the same fate ourselves.

About the Seattle-Tehran Poster Show:

It is a selection of fifty posters from each city in a variety of mediums sharing cultural themes such as music, fillm, theater and contemporary art. Artists ranged from Tehran University Professors to younger talents born since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, both male and female. The Iranian designs are paired with Seattle designs and the exhibition is premiering at Bumbershoot as the first exhibition of contemporary Iranian posters hosted in this country. In 2009, the exhibit will travel to Iran and the designers will meet each other.

Here is another website:

Fellowship for Reconciliation - The Conscience of the Peace Community - founded in 1914, following World War II. It is an international interfaith movement with chapters in 43 countries and there are 100 local groups in the US. The Fellowship opposes war and seeks those who will respond to conflict nonviolently. Delegations of peacemakers are sent to conflicted regions and to nations regarded as "enemies" and there they reach out on a people-to-people basis. In 2005, delegations started to go to Iran. American delegations have also gone to Vietnam, the former Soviet Union, Iraq, Nicaragua, Colomobia, Israel/Palestine, Philippines, much of Eastern Europe.