LA/Nagoya Sister City Children’s Art Exchange

On Monday, October 3, 2016, Maryam Gueramian, USC IGM Art Gallery Young Professionals Committee Member and Lynn Crandall, IGM Art Gallery Director and LANSCA member met at the home of  Miriam Stenshoel, Chair of the LANSCA Art Committee to deliver the student art work and prepare the certificates for the students.

To open the slide show and see captions, left click once on top photo and proceed through the slides by clicking arrow that appears on the top right side of photo.

The Los Angeles Nagoya Sister City Affiliation (LANSCA) Children’s Art Exchange is a program for children of elementary through high school ages in which art is produce and exchanged with Los Angeles’ sister city in Japan, Nagoya.  “Art is an international language understood by all.” So stated Igor Babailov, the Russian American portrait artist. The Art Committee of LANSCA cultivates art programs to deepen our relationship with children and artists of Nagoya, using this fundamental principal, that art is a way of communicating without words.

LANSCA’s Art Committee promotes art exchanges and projects to strengthen the ties between our two cities. The Children’s Art Exchange is a program that has continued through so many decades that no one knows exactly when it started. To further develop our programs, we are building partnerships with existing children’s art programs, galleries, and art organizations. We are seeking to work with organizations in Los Angeles that are interested in building city to city relationships through the arts. We welcome corporate sponsorship to help expand these programs.

Every year art is collected from children in Los Angeles and sent to the City of Nagoya for exhibition at the Nagoya Friendship Art Exhibition in November.  Art seen in photos in this article is from Hesby Oaks Leadership Charter 5th grade class taught by Parisa Collier.  IGM AG Advisory Council Member, Maryam Gueramian brought the work to LANSCA.  With art from other schools in LA, these works will join children’s art from Nagoya’s many other sister cities to be shown at the Nagoya Friendship Art Exhibition.  In 2012, 38,299 people attended the exhibition that also included our LA student work.

Art from the children of Nagoya is exhibited at sites in Los Angeles as well.  The USC Institute for Genetic Medicine Art Gallery has, on several occasions, served as the site for the Japanese children’s art exhibitions.

The LANSCA Art Committee supports artists who bring Japan and America together through arts. Some exhibitions LANSCA has supported are Mike’s Saijo’s Soft Machine: DNA exhibition and Richard Fukuhara’s Shadows: For the Sake of the Children exhibition.

“Maryam Gueramian has been involved with the LANSCA art project since 2010. In her first year, since Lynn Crandall had already collected art from Los Angeles schools, Maryam decided to administer an art session for the students of the Persian language class at the IMAN Foundation (Iranian Cultural Center). She intended to create a 3 way cultural exchange with the hope of one day reinstating the LA Tehran Sister Cities Association.”