Facilitator will bring project to DAI in conjunction with exhibit

By Marshall Weiss, The Dayton Jewish Observer

Since 1993, Israeli artist Miri Golan has used origami as a tool for Israeli and Palestinian children to get to know each other as equals.

The founder and director of the Israel Origami Center, Golan also established Folding Together and oversees its Israeli component. The not-for-profit brings children together from east and west Jerusalem who wouldn’t otherwise meet. Together, they create works of origami.

“We do activities to help them look at the other side, people to people,” Golan says via phone from Jerusalem. “We want to show how similar we are. The children say, ‘They are exactly like us.’ The idea is to let them feel they are the same.”

Golan will bring a taste of her Folding Together program to The Dayton Art Institute on the afternoon of April 9 and will participate on an interfaith panel discussion, Peace By Piece: Art As A Catalyst for Social Justice, at 7 p.m. in the museum’s Gothic Cloister.

Three of Golan’s works are on view as part of the exhibition Above The Fold: New Expressions in Origami at The Dayton Art Institute through May 13.

One of her pieces, Two Books, features origami figures emerging from pages of the Torah and the Koran and reaching out to each other.

Works by her husband, English origami artist Paul Jackson — creative director of Folding Together — are also part of the exhibit.

For the afternoon Folding Together program, Golan will work with youths from Dayton’s Jewish community and Arab-Israeli middle school students visiting Dayton from the village of Deir al-Assad in Israel’s Lower Galilee region.

Their visit marks the seventh time since 2011 that Dayton’s Dr. Martha Moody Jacobs has facilitated a spring trip to Dayton for Arab-Israeli students from Deir al-Assad.

Jacobs and Dr. Jamal Assadi from the village coordinate a summer English-language camp in Deir al-Assad with volunteers from Ohio.

Golan’s programs at The Dayton Art Institute are presented in partnership with the Jewish Community Relations Council, which Jacobs chairs, with funding from the World Religion Foundation.

Above The Fold: New Expressions in Origami, including works by Israeli artist Miri Golan, is on exhibit at The Dayton Art Institute through May 13. Admission is $14 adults, $11 seniors and students, $6 ages 7 to 17, free for members.

Golan will participate on an interfaith panel, Peace By Piece: Art As A Catalyst for Social Justice, at 7 p.m. on Monday, April 9 at The Dayton Art Institute in partnership with the Jewish Community Relations Council. $20 includes the panel, a dessert reception, and admission to Above The Fold. R.S.V.P. to Karen Steiger, 610-1555.

To read the complete March 2018 Dayton Jewish Observer, click here.