The Alachua County Library District: First in Florida to Exhibit They Still Draw Pictures: Children’s Art in Wartime

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GAINESVILLE, FL – The Alachua County Library District is hosting They Still Draw Pictures, an exhibit about Children’s Art in Wartime from the Spanish Civil War to Kosovo. The exhibit will be on display from Monday, August 4th to September 4th, 2009 at the Headquarters Library in downtown Gainesville. Access to the exhibit will be available free of charge to all visitors during regularly scheduled business hours.

About the Exhibit

More than 200,000 of the 600,000 refugees who sought shelter from Generalissimo Francisco Franco's tyranny were children. Families fled to the security of Republican-controlled eastern Spain where The Republic responded by establishing colonias infantiles (children's colonies). Within the colonies, the young refugees produced thousands of drawings. Today those drawings have been compiled into a moving exhibit entitled “They Still Draw Pictures”, and serves as a moving, collective testimony of the experience of being a child in wartime.

They Still Draw Pictures includes a cross-section of the children's art produced in the colonies, as well as a selection of drawings from later wars, spanning from the Holocaust to Kosovo. Each collection bears a tragic and uncanny resemblance to their Spanish counterparts. Born of the trauma of exile and separation, the drawings are invaluable historical documents, giving physical form to the children's experiences of air raids, brutality, destruction, and homelessness. These pictures also represent daily life in the colonies and preserve the children's clear memories of life before the war and hope for life after it.