Visual artist John Halaka came into a greater awareness of civil and human rights as a college student in the 1970s, and that desire to learn about and amplify the varied histories and experiences of others has only expanded over the years. That expansion can be seen in his latest exhibition, “Listening to the Unheard/Drawing the Unseen: Meditations on Presence and Absence in Native Lands,” focused on the stories of Native American, Black, and Palestinian people.
Residing here in America, and being influenced by the American Indian Movement, the Civil Rights Movement, I wanted to learn more about that and there are definitely heroes within those movements. So, I started with the idea that I was going to do a whole bunch of drawings on maps of the U.S. and a whole bunch of drawings on maps of Palestine.