Lynsey Addario, photograph, from Congo/Women

“The arts play a powerful role as mirror and map to influence social change. Art allows us to be the most human we can be—it advocates for humanity and human response, and art does have consequences,” said Jane M. Saks, codirector and cocreator of the international touring exhibition Congo/Women. “Congo/Women sheds light not only on the situation facing women of the Democratic Republic of Congo, but on gender-based violence around the world.”

Saks, executive director of Columbia’s Ellen Stone Belic Institute for the Study of Women and Gender in the Arts and Media (ESB Institute), created the exhibition in collaboration with Leslie Thomas, director of Art Works Project, an organization dedicated to raising awareness of human rights and environmental issues through design and the arts. Congo/Women, a photography exhibition and educational program, opened at Columbia College Chicago in February 2009 and has since traveled to Washington, D.C., (twice) and New York.

The second D.C. showing, at the invitation of Senator Barbara Boxer, was timed to coincide with the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Joint Subcommittee hearing, Confronting Rape and Other Forms of Violence Against Women in Conflict Zones. The exhibition, scheduled to tour the United States, Europe, and Africa over the next two years, will have its official opening in early October and be installed until November 2009 at the United Nations Headquarters’ exhibition space in New York, in partnership with the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA). The exhibition and educational initiative was supported by the UNFPA, Humanity United, Oak Foundation, and Pritzker Pucker Foundation as well as Leadership Donors and other private donors of the ESB Institute.

Featuring photographs by photojournalists Lynsey Addario (2009 Pulitzer Prize winner and 2008 ESB Institute fellow), Marcus Bleasdale, Ron Haviv, and James Nachtwey, the exhibition and educational campaign are designed to raise awareness of the widespread sexual violence facing women and girls in the Democratic Republic of Congo and illuminate the global epidemic of gender-based sexual violence that confronts women and girls worldwide.

For information and exhibition schedule, visit colum.edu/congo/women.