Open Day of Art

Open Day of Art is an annual event that takes place on March 15 where people gather in the streets with their friends, families, and children to create art on the streets. The main purpose of this event is to engage the larger community in creating art that reflects their own unique ideas and identities and to engage them with art that promotes values of peace, tolerance, and coexistence.

People from different countries, backgrounds, experiences, genders, and ages are welcome to participate in this event, and no prior experience in art is needed for successful participation.

The event was first launched on March 15, 2015, three years after launching the artistic campaign “Color the Walls of Your Street”, in which I called Yemenis to paint on the streets’ walls marred by bullets and conflict bombs. We were not then struggling within politics; rather we were struggling against the politics that aimed its guns’ nozzles at the walls of our streets and our souls. This event and all artistic campaigns that proceeded and came after it would not have succeeded without a basic factor – people’s participation.

The participation of people in street art campaigns is the complete opposite of the “one voice-one color” politics that we are forced to consume on TV screens, newspapers, internet pages and public spaces of our cities. One of the main objectives of this event is creating an environment of tolerance and coexistence by connecting people from different communities and cultures at a time when war, borders, and politics are dividing them. Thus, community participation offers the chance to create diverse art that has its own way of dissolving differences and borders between people, bringing them together to express shared experiences, frustrations, and wishes.

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