The International Human Rights Art Movement
has
Featured more than 2000 artists from 100+ countries since our founding in 2017.
Presented six IHRAF Festivals in New York City, to more than 4000 in-person audience members.
Helped safeguard activist-artists in Uganda, Zimbabwe, Afghanistan, Palestine, Kenya, Cameroon, Kazakhstan, Kashmir and other locales, where artists can risk their safety simply to write a poem, give a spoken word performance or interview victims of civil war.
Have created networks to aid and highlight artists with Avant-Garde Artists (Paris), UNESCO-RILA (Glasgow), PEN Artists-at-Risk program (NYC), European Network of Migrant Women (Brussels), NYC Commission on Human Rights and many more organizations around the world.
Have promoted our artists and their causes to hundreds of thousands of people around the world with our Facebook, Instagram, newsletter and website, where artists in villages in India, Bangladesh, Malawi, Nepal and other countries can find international visibility.
Pay all of our artists — often for the first time, giving them a sense of importance in themselves, their work and their struggle for human rights.
Been featured in the New York Times, Fox Five Morning Show, NBC Live!, NY Observer, Crain’s NY Business, Metro-NY, AM-NY, Gay City News, Brooklyn Rail, The Dramatist, Religion News Service, Hollywood Reporter, Naira (Nigeria), Episcopal Cafe, Playbill, Broadway World, Christian Post, New York Observer, Huffington Post, Christian Post, Different Truths (India), Womawords Press (Zimbabwe) and more!
Check out what our artists are saying about IHRAM HERE!
What we do:
IHRAM Press: Highlight literary creators from 100+ countries and 37 states, in a quarterly literary magazine.
IHRAM Books: Publish anthologies of writers around the world, using their pen as a sword of justice and human rights.
IHRAM Awards: Monetary awards for creators using their passion and beauty to raise awareness, fight back and embolden the forces of positive social change.
Rhonda Gail Williford Poetry Award
IHRAM African Secretariat: Sponsor an expanding series of publishing opportunities, interviews with African creators, workshops, classes and events through our offices in Ibadan, Nigeria and Gweru, Zimbabwe.
International Fellows: Support individual creators from around the world on a specific program of awareness raising and change-making for a year.
Youth Fellows: Support individual youth creators from around the world on a specific program of awareness raising and change-making for a year.
IHRAF Festival: Offer performances in NYC of an international collective of presenters, all offering beautiful and vulnerable work with social change at its core.
But can art matter?
Why Authoritarians Attack the Arts, New York Times: “As Hitler understood, artists play a distinctive role in challenging authoritarianism. Art creates pathways for subversion, for political understanding and solidarity among coalition builders. Art teaches us that lives other than our own have value."
The Art of Occupy: Occupy Wall Street was the most successful activist movement of our century, and it was fueled by art. It began to fight the $7.25 federal minimum wage, among other economic and social injustices. Today, not even 15 years later, more than 50% of minimum wage workers in the USA are paid $15/hour, even though the Federal minimum wage has not changed.
Black Lives Matter Art: The BLM Movement was fueled by art and has led to the rise of DEI programs, much greater awareness of institutional racism in the USA, and a reconsideration of the legal and criminal system vis-a-vis historically-marginalized people in America. "On June 5, 2020, during the George Floyd protests, the DC Public Works Department painted the words "Black Lives Matter" in 35-foot-tall yellow capital letters on 16th Street NW on the north of Lafayette Square, part of President's Park near the White House, with the assistance of the MuralsDC program of the DC Department of Public Works, with the DC flag accompanying the text. This would eventually cause the renaming of 16th street NW to Black Lives Matter Plaza. Multiple other cities across the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom, subsequently painted similar murals, including Cincinnati, Indianapolis, Portland, Salt Lake City, Santa Cruz, California, and Springfield, Massachusetts."
John Lewis said on the proprietorial video he made for us about the importance of art to the Civil Rights Movement: “Without art, the Civil Rights Movement would have been like a bird without wings.”
Annual Reports and 990’s
