"Focus on Love" - An Illuminated mural of a girl from Gaza

We are a group of artists and collaborators raising funds to have several new rouge art exhibitions representing the people and culture of Palestine during this year's BLINK 2024 event in Cincinnati, OH.

BLINK is the largest music, arts and lights festival in the United States of America, and is expected to draw a crowd of over 2 Million people over the weekend of October 17th-20th

The funds are needed for surface prep, paint, materials, and technical equipment required to paint a large scale mural (40ft tall x 70ft wide) of a girl from Gaza who got dressed up wearing a bright green jacket and heart shaped sunglasses with a bow in her hair to celebrate Eid, despite the ongoing atrocities in Gaza that have been unfolding over the past year.

New mural location:

(surface preparation work has already begun 10/3/2024)

After the mural is painted, it will then be illuminated at night with state of the art laser projectors and animation and music during the weekend of Oct 17th - 20th. These funds will be used to cover the cost of technical equipment required to execute large-scale art installations and to fairly compensate the co-artists, technicians, and contractors working under the direction of the principal artist, Jason Alghussein, who will be donating his time, labor, and technical & creative project management and mural painting at no cost. A small allocation of these funds will also be used for other various smaller-scale illuminated exhibits during the BLINK event.

Jason (Yacoub) Khaled Alghussein is the principal artist and muralist overseeing and co-ordinating this effort with various other artists, animators, theater set producers, and software engineers.

Jason is the son of a Palestinian refugee and Nakba Survivor, born in 1932 in Ramleh, Palestine, and forced to flee their home like many other Palestinians during the 1948 Nakba of Palestine, following the Deir Yassin Massacre.

He is known for a previous mural titled, "Welcome to Jaffa," a 50 foot tall painting of the famous Palestinian Jaffa Oranges, also in Cincinnati, Ohio.
Featured in Cincinnati Magazine, and City Beat.

Our goal of these large scale art exhibitions and collaborations is to educate others on the history and plight of the Palestinian people, foster a shared spirit of empathy and humanity, and serve as a means to subsequently highlight and promote the invaluable organizations doing humanitarian work on the ground in Palestine, like the Palestine's Children Relief Fund. Through our coordinated digital media efforts following the completion of these art installations and exhibitions, we hope to further drive donations to the Palestine Children's Relief Fund.

If you are considering making a donation for this artistic endeavor, we ask that you also consider a parallel donation to the Palestine's Children Relief Fund directly through their website .

As artists, creators, and collaborators, we are united and collectively opposed to all forms of racism, systemic oppression, and war. The work for this new large-scale exhibition will be titled “Focus on Love.”

This will be a large-scale art project, executed on a very tight timeline, requiring the coordinated efforts of many team members working diligently to keep the project on track. As a result, we ask that you help lighten our workload by sharing and promoting this page and project, to help us raise the funds needed. Doing so will allow us to remain focused on the execution of the actual creative and technical work.

If you are unable to donate anything but wish to support our work and this artistic endeavor, the best thing to do is help continually share this project far and wide for us.

Due to the nature of the project, co-artists, collaborators and technicians are providing their support at significantly reduced rates, to maximize the impact of donor funds. The lions share of expenses of this project are directly related to the cost of equipment, heavy machinery and materials. (Boom lifts, projectors, generators, spray guns, scaffolding, paint, supplies, mortar, labor, fuel etc.)

Follow :

@welcometojaffa on instagram to keep track of the progress of this project!

Contact:

https://www.welcometojaffa.com/

Any help locating the original photographer and name of the girl in the photograph would be greatly appreciated.

An example of 2022 previous mural illumination: