Arts Educators
Claudia Bernardi is an internationally renown artist who works in the fields of human rights and social justice and who has exhibited her work in over 40 solo exhibitions. In all of her work over the past t wo decades – whether as an artist through installation, sculpture, and printmaking, as an educator through teaching and lecturing, or as a participant in human rights investigations – she has impacted thousands of people with her integrity, compassion, and truthfulness. She is an artist who has witnessed monstrous atrocities and unspeakable human tragedies, yet speaks of these horrors in ways that communicate the persistence of hope, undeniable integrity, and necessary remembrance.
Born in Buenos Aires, Bernardi and her younger sister lost their parents while teenagers during a highly unstable time in the history of Argentina – a time of dictatorship and extreme political unrest. “You do not have the luxury of choosing to be apolitical in Argentina,” says Bernardi. “By simply living in a dictatorship, you are politically involved and constantly at risk.” Argentines lived in perpetual fear that they personally, or someone closely related, would become a desaparecido, a disappeared citizen; 30,000 desaparecidos were documented during the so-called “Dirty War” waged by the Argentine military from 1976 to 1983. She left Argentina for the U.S. in 1979.
In 1984, a forensic anthropology team was established under the new government in Argentina to supply evidence of violations of human rights carried out against civilian populations. The team utilized the rigorous methods of traditional archaeology to examine, document, and publicly expose mass burial graves. Returning to Argentina to work in collaboration with the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team (AFAT) – a team that included her sister, Patricia, one of the founding members of AFAT – Bernardi learned the meticulous scientific methods of handling human remains. AFAT have conducted exhumations of mass graves all over the world and have reported their findings to the United Nations. Bernardi joined the AFAT in investigations of human rights violations in El Salvador, Guatemala, Argentina, and Ethiopia. Part of Bernardi’s responsibilities included the creation of the archeological maps and transcribing the testimonies of families of the “disappeared ones.” From here, Bernardi realized the full import of how art could be used to educate, elucidate, and articulate the communal memories of survivors of human rights atrocities.
Bernardi received an MFA from the National Institute of Fine Arts in Buenos Aires and an MA and her second MFA from the University of California at Berkeley in 1985. Bernardi was awarded in 2004 an Honorary Degree, Doctor of Fine Arts, Honoris Causa, by the College of Wooster, Ohio. She has taught at the Universidad de El Salvador, Colegio Nacional de Buenos Aires, California College of the Arts, Mills College, the San Francisco Art Institute, and the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. She was a California Arts Council Artist-in-Residence from 1990-1993 and 1994-1995 for the Artist in the Community project directed to the population of political refugees and survivors of torture from Latin America and was an East Bay Community Foundation Art Project Artist-in-Residence in 1993-1994. She has exhibited her work both nationally and internationally: The International World Peace Center in Hiroshima, The Centre for Building Peace, Donegal, Northern Ireland; DAH Teatar in Belgrade, Serbia and Montenegro; The University of Haifa, Israel. Locally at the San Francisco Art Commission Gallery, Lux Gallery, MACLA, Center for Latin American Studies at UC Berkeley, Thatcher Gallery at University of San Francisco, Artist’s Forum, Palo Alto Cultural Center, Carl Gorman Museum at U.C. Davis, and Berkeley Art Center. She was the subject of a 2000 documentary produced by Joe Segura of Arizona’s Segura Publishing Company entitled Pasa un Angel/An Angel Passes, which screened at New York’s Margaret Mead Film Festival and at the San Francisco International Film Festival, where it won the Golden Spire Award for Best Art Film.
Bernardi is also the recent recipient of a prestigious Creative Work Fund award, to support the collaboration with choreographer Kimi Okada of the ODC Dance Company to create “Flight to Ixcan,” a performance exploring personal loss in the context of the rash of political deaths occurring in Central and South America in the 1970s. In 2004, Bernardi has been awarded a Tides Foundation grant and a Potrero Nuevo Fund Grant to support her project to create an Art School/ Open Studio in Perquin, a rural community in post war El Salvador.
The collaborator and adjunct artist to the school is Valeria Galliso. Ms. Galliso was a student of Bernardi in several courses taught at the University of Rosario in the province of Santa Fé, between 1998 and 2000. These postdoctoral seminars were created for students of Art, Social Sciences, Humanities, Political Sciences and Law. Valeria Galliso was a participant in these courses and was instrumental in the creation of their logistics and publicity. She later joined Bernardi in Perquin in February of 2001 where, once more, she demonstrated her remarkable capacity as an educator and as an artist. She collaborated in organizing the painting of the mural at the square. She was highly capable in directing the drawing and painting workshops and, at all times, her presence and professionalism was a key role in the success of the above mentioned projects. Valeria Galliso holds a Masters in Community Arts from the University of Rosario, Santa Fé, Argentina.
Teaching Assistants
A wonderful and dear friend, Doña Carmen Bross, an 84 years old Salvadoran activist who lives in the US and who has been having a long time connection with the cooperatives of the north of Morazán came to visit us. I have had the pleasure to meet Doña Carmen early in January 2005. When she visited us and our School of Art in the month of June, she was gladly surprised by the community participation in art projects of all sorts and moved by seeing so much activity amongst its inhabitants.
Doña Carmen, very generously, offered to provide two scholarships for students of the school. However, when we told her that the School of Art is free of charge for the participants, we asked her to consider giving the School of Art funding to hire and pay salaries to artists/ assistants.
Doña Carmen was delighted with the idea and she gave us 5,000$ to create two paid positions within the School of Art and Open Studio of Perquin.
We have hired four wonderful young artists as apprentices with the project of developing their art and leadership skills. Rosa del Carmen Argueta from the community of Arambala and Rigoberto Martinez, from El Ocotillo, Claudia Verenice Flores Escolero, y América Argentina “Dina” Vaquerano*, whom are currently teaching and leading various classes for children ages, 6 to 10 and another group of 10 to 14.
The teaching assistants are being paid $8 an hour which constitutes a huge salary!!! Most people in this region, especially “campesinos”, still would work for a plate of food daily and no payment.
We are happy and proud for having generated in this first six months of our School of Art in Perquin two new job opportunities. We are deeply thankful and endlessly humbled by the generosity of Doña Carmen Bross. We are committed to continue developing more work possibilities through the arts for more young people of Perquin and the north of Morazán.