Featured Artist of the month

Each month we feature one artist from our Community Artists page here on our website, in our monthly newsletter, on Instagram, and on Facebook. We will also host an artist’s talk with them over Zoom so our audience can get to know them better. Check back at the beginning of each month for a new artist to learn about. And view artists from past months here.

February 2025: Barry Hart

We are happy to introduce Barry Hart as our Featured Artist of February! Read on to learn about Barry, his connection to the Leo Marchutz School, and his career in Peacebuilding (including Peacebuilding and the Arts). You can also see a selection of his artwork below. And mark your calendars for an artist’s talk with Barry on Wednesday, February 26th at 1:00 PM Eastern Time. Register ahead of time on Zoom by following this link.

About Barry Hart, PhD

Barry Hart is Professor Emeritus of Trauma, Identity, and Conflict Studies in the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding at Eastern Mennonite University (EMU). Dr. Hart has conducted workshops on peacebuilding, psychosocial trauma recovery, and reconciliation for religious and secular leaders in Northern Ireland, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Ivory Coast, Uganda, Burundi, and South Africa. Hart lived and worked in the Balkans for five years where he developed and led trauma and conflict transformation programs for schools, communities, and religious leaders. Barry was the Team Leader for a USAID Tolerance Assessment in Bosnia-Herzegovina (2009). He was also engaged in a three-year peacebuilding institute and curriculum development project between EMU and the University of Hargeisa in Somaliland (2008-2011); and taught peacebuilding at the University of Sarajevo from 2018-2020. In 2021-2022, Barry was the lead trainer/consultant for a UNDP-sponsored Training of Trainers of 45 psychosocial facilitators in South Sudan. Dr. Hart is on the Board of Directors of the Leo Marchutz School of Painting and Drawing in Aix-en-Provence, France, where he teaches the course: Peacebuilding and the Arts during the five-week summer program each year. He is also on the advisory board of a Swiss group that is starting a three-year Arts and Peace Encounters program that will bring together “artists, change makers, academics, policymakers,” and peacebuilding practitioners to further develop the important partnership between art and peacebuilding. 

Artist/Professor Statement

I was a student of Leo Marchutz, Bill Weyman, and Sam Bjorklund during the fall and spring of 1970/71. I returned to Aix in 1973 to work at the Leo Marchutz School, mainly as the driver of the old police van. I had a wonderful time driving students to Arles and various motifs in Provence. That was the year I also moved to central France to live with a monk and make cheese. The monk, Pere Paul de Madeline, greatly admired Leo’s lithographs and paintings. 

These years with Leo, Billy, Sam (and the Monk), impacted my way of seeing the world and helped me learn to be more fully in it. It was the spiritual aspect of art and learning to experience nature “in her manner of operation,” that allowed me to see my connection to it. It is a type of unity or bondedness that is sacred, and so often broken by war and other forms of relational violence. It was this realization that set me on a different but related path to art. I studied theoretical and practical peacebuilding, which is undergirded by similar values and principles I discovered in art and spirituality. 

The Leo Marchutz School set me on this path through its focus on “deep seeing” and being personally transformed through experiencing nature and the world wholistically; or as Leo said, “Seeing the whole before the parts.” I understand this as a truth not only for the artist, but to help all of us realize and practice our interconnectedness and interdependence. Peace and its corollary, just relationships, can be an outcome of such a practice.  

- Barry Hart, PhD

Selected Work

Previous Featured Artists

To view featured artists from past months, click here.

  • December 2024/January 2025: Alan Roberts

  • November 2024: Ben Haggard

  • October 2024: Amelia Myre

  • September 2024: Becky Hagenston

  • August 2024: Paul Umbarger

  • June/July 2024: Featured Exhibition in Aix-en-Provence

  • May 2024: Sharon Rawlins

  • April 2024: Kate Butler

  • March 2024: Pauline Bétrancourt

  • February 2024: Jenna Grotelueschen

  • January 2024: Mary Leone Duffy

  • December 2023: Elizabeth Ivers

  • November 2023: Cole Carothers

  • October 2023: Grace Darden

  • September 2023: King David

  • August 2023: Chris Coffey

  • July 2023: Jim Toub

  • June 2023: Jennifer Neel

  • May 2023: Jan Brogan

  • April 2023: Sophia Hall

  • March 2023: Lucy Clare Spooner

  • February 2023: Samantha Van Heest

  • December 2022: Hilary Stein

  • November 2022: Nick Cruz Velleman

  • October 2022: Miranda Blas

  • September 2022: Samuel Bjorklund