'Half the Sky' exhibition hopes to inspire action

The folk saying “a hen cannot speak in front of a rooster" expresses a cultural bias that silences women’s voices in Burundi. An exhibition called “Women Hold Up Half the Sky” at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles until May 20 profiles a 36-year-old mother of six, Goretti Nyabenda, who was powerless in her family, saying, “I had no voice.” Defying her husband, determined to escape his beatings, Goretti joined a solidarity group sponsored by the aid organization CARE. After she received a $2 loan, she built a thriving banana-beer business.

“Now I know I have good ideas,” Goretti (who has become a community leader) crows, “and I tell people what I think.”

The title of the exhibition comes from a Chinese proverb "Women hold up half the sky." The exhibit is based on the bestselling book by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, "Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity for Women Worldwide." Both book and exhibition focus on negative realities (trafficking, gender-based violence, and maternal mortality) and how empowering women through education and bringing them into the labor force provides positive gains.

It’s an exhibition with a mission. “It was a challenge,” according to consulting curator Karina White, “to take these really overwhelming and devastating issues and think about how to present them to inspire people to action.”

Skirball Museum director Robert Kirschner calls the show “not really an art exhibition. It’s not a collection of artifacts. It’s about ideas. It’s really about social conscience and focusing on certain issues and engaging a broad community.”

Turning a book dense with horrifying statistics (like the statement that more girls are killed in “routine ‘gendercide’ in any one decade than people were slaughtered in all the genocides of the 20th century”) into a visual experience was a daunting task. “How to make an exhibition without making it exhibitionistic?” Mr. Kirschner poses the dilemma.

The Skirball, dedicated to promoting a pluralistic society in which all are accorded dignity, is not a human rights organization. For the exhibition, the Jewish cultural center partnered with advocacy groups and nongovernmental organizations with expertise in the area.

The advisory committee stressed the danger of appearing paternalistic, even if well-intentioned, if the show featured social injustice in less privileged nations without highlighting local women’s leadership in setting an example of courage. More than statistics of atrocities, the show spotlights individuals who transform lives through activism.

“My primary goal was to inspire visitors to be moved and to take action,” Ms. White says. She balances emotional impact – like a wall of silhouetted women waiting to tell their stories of mass rape in the Congo – with images and text showing change is occurring. The West African group Tostan, for example, has educated women to end the centuries-old tradition of female genital cutting in 5,000 villages in Senegal.

White also commissioned new artworks to illustrate the themes, like sound recordings by artist Ben Rubin of local women trafficked and held in domestic slavery or forced into prostitution. (An estimated 10,000 women are held in Los Angeles underground brothels, according to immigration agents, and thousands are forced into labor without pay or hope of escape.) Survivors tell their stories, like a 33-year-old Kenyan woman who finally escaped to a shelter, saying in a soft, halting voice: “All we have to do is be strong.”

A lobby installation features the well-known Los Angeles artist Kim Abeles’s “Pearls of Wisdom: End the Violence.” During a two-year community-engagement collaboration, Ms. Abeles worked with domestic-violence survivors in shelters, producing 800 pearlescent sculptures, a small sample of which are shown.

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