EXHIBITION HIGHLIGHTS CHILDREN’S
LIVES IN ETHIOPIA
April 25–September 30, 2007
Bright Futures: Children in Ethiopia
Exploris Museum,
201 E. Hargett Street, Raleigh, North Carolina
The exhibition Bright Futures: Children
in Ethiopia, featuring photographs by Elena Rue, will open
at the Exploris Museum, 201 E. Hargett Street in Raleigh, on April
25, 2007, and run through September 30, 2007. Rue, based in Ethiopia
from January to October 2006, worked closely with orphaned children
living in group homes supported by the organization Hope for Children
(HFC).
Started six years ago by an Ethiopian woman in response to the rapidly
growing number of children orphaned by HIV/AIDS, Hope for Children
gives support to more than six hundred children. The homes offered
by HFC are the size of a traditional Ethiopian family (six-eight
children), and each is headed by a group home mother. Rue, based
in Ethiopia as a Lewis Hine Documentary Fellow, worked with eight
HFC group homes. An outgrowth of Rue’s experiences, Bright
Futures provides a window into the lives of Ethiopian children and
a sense of this remarkable and effective response to the overwhelming
problem of HIV and AIDS. (For an on-line viewing of some of this
work, go to http://cds.aas.duke.edu/hine/rue.html.)
“Elena Rue brings us close to the experiences of these Ethiopian
children. She has made color photographs so penetratingly beautiful
that we can see beyond the crisis that has engendered these expressions,
see far and deep enough to recognize our common humanity,”
said Alex Harris, founder and creative director of the Lewis Hine
Documentary Fellows Program and a professor at Duke University.
The Lewis Hine Documentary Fellows Program is a project of the Center
for Documentary Studies (CDS) at Duke University. Each year, Hine
Fellows are sent to work domestically and abroad with local organizations
to document humanitarian issues over the course of ten months. They
then return to work with documentarians at CDS to continue to develop
their projects. Hine Fellows, graduates of Duke University and of
the Continuing Studies Certificate Program at the Center for Documentary
Studies, are selected each spring.
Exploris will further enliven this exhibit with a combination of
activities for school groups and families. Visiting classes may
schedule an introduction to the exhibit provided by a member of
Exploris’s educational team, or they may arrange for a guided
tour of the exhibit to help immerse students in a comparison between
their lives in North Carolina and the lives of children living in
Ethiopia. Families visiting the exhibit will also have the opportunity
to join a guided tour, and on weekends they may participate in the
exhibit’s activity station. Activities will include dressing
up in Ethiopian traditional clothing, writing one’s name in
Amharic, and creating traditional protection scrolls.
The production of Bright Futures: Children in Ethiopia is supported
by the Lewis Hine Documentary Fellows Program at the Center for
Documentary Studies at Duke University.
The Lewis Hine Documentary Fellows Program is supported by the Bernard
van Leer Foundation, the Philanthropic Initiative, and the Jessica
Jennifer Cohen Foundation.
banner image:
Partial view of the Lyndhurst Gallery, one of four exhibition spaces
at CDS. Photograph by Christopher Sims.
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