arch/ive/ief (2000 - 2005)

On May 3rd 2003, The Works on Shirts Project present an international exhibition of artistic reactions to war consisting of original works of art created on the backs of white cotton dress shirts. On the day of the event, participants in cities around the world will form walking art galleries, wearing war-inspired works they've created into museums and monuments, parks and shopping malls to help raise public awareness of the realities of war in our time.

The organizers have named the show "Wearnica", a reference to Picasso's famous anti-war mural, "Guernica", which was recently the center of controversy when the U.N.'s decided to cover the tapestry of it hanging outside the security council chambers prior to Secretary of State, Colin Powell's address to the Security Council.

In 1937, Picasso was moved by the massive bombing of a small Basque town in northern Spain to create what has become one of the twentieth century's most profound visual expressions of the brutal and self-destructive nature of war.

In 2003, faced with the war in Iraq and continuing conflicts throughout the world, The Works on Shirts Project has created WEARNICA to give people in the U.S. and around the world an opportunity to publicly express their own personal reactions to war.

According to Athomas Goldberg, the group's founder, "The irony of the Guernica cover-up is that by pressuring the U. N. into concealing the mural, the administration was sending a very clear message: 'People will have a hard time supporting military action if they are forced to consider the human consequences of war.' Our response was to give people an opportunity to explore for themselves the cost of war and to bring these modern 'Guernicas' into their communities where they might foster a real dialog on the impact of war in our time."

The Works on Shirts Project was formed in the spring of 1993 to address the division between fine art and popular culture by exploring new ways of bringing contemporary art into the public eye. For the group's first exhibition, eighteen artists were selected to produce a total of twenty-one works of art on the backs of white, cotton dress shirts. The pieces included works in paint, mixed media, heat-transferred images, framed photographs, and interactive art. Over the course of two weekends in May and June of that year, the show was walked into the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum, The Guggenheim and the Guggenheim Soho, where for two hours in each location, the artists' backs formed the walls and easels of a living art gallery alongside the permanent collections and exhibits of the museum.