To Fear or Not to Fear,” an exhibit of work by ten artists mostly from war-torn countries, probably won’t break any attendance records at Highland Park’s Art Center, where it’s now on display. Ostensibly examining the ways that “the global media perpetuates a feeling of fear that permeates all cultures,” it’s heavy stuff and mostly didactic–from Anya Belyat-Giunta’s drawings of apparently bullet-riddled babies to Granite Amit’s ever evolving Grapes of Wrath, with its litany of Palestinian and Israeli suffering. But for curator Vesna Rebernak, who plans to take it to the east and west coasts (and maybe even as far as Chicago), it’s enough that it even exists. It’s evidence thatthe organization she poured herself into for ten years, Links for International Promotion of the Arts, isn’t among the dead.
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The story behind LIPA is both political and intensely personal. Rebernak, who grew up in the pastoral northern part of the former Yugoslavia that’s now Slovenia, came to Chicago in 1988 to study architecture at UIC. After graduation she stayed, working at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, and watched in dismay as conflict in the Balkans escalated. Desperate to do something that might help, she founded two human rights groups. The first, Dialogue for Peace, was a multiethnic organization of Yugoslavs living in Chicago. Intended to counter “media misinformation about centuries of hate” as a cause of problems in the area, it succumbed to factionalism after the Bosnian civil war broke out. The second, Bridge for Humanity, limped along after both anti-Croatian and anti-Serbian factions threatened to bomb a multicultural dance program it was sponsoring. But there was an upside to her frustrated efforts: while attending a Washington peace conference she met and fell in love with another activist, a Bosnian expat mathematician named Amer Beslagic, a professor at George Mason University in D.C.
LIPA left the Fine Arts Building in March 2006, and Rebernak toyed with the idea of moving to New York. Here, it seemed, the organization had run out of steam: volunteers who’d labored to rehab the Fine Arts space less than two years before were exhausted and grants were increasingly hard to come by. She says grant-making organizations, never enthusiastic about the Michigan Avenue address, would ask, “What community are you serving?” But once LIPA lost that space, funding became even more elusive. It seemed to her that grant makers didn’t really read her proposals–instead, she says, “they look at the budget, at who you serve, who’s on the board.” The process of “begging for money” became “disgusting.” Concluding that “in this country, no one’s really interested in promoting international understanding,” she says, “I gave up.” For most of last year, Rebernak focused on her freelance architecture practice, and during that period LIPA’s nonprofit status with the state lapsed.
