Newport children weaved into world peace

Danette Goulet

NEWPORT BEACH -- Children at Newport Elementary School became part of

a worldwide call for peace Friday.

Like hundreds of people in Russia, England, Australia and all over the

United States, Newport students joined in artist Peggy McManigal’s living

art project, “Weaving the Dream.”

Each participant brings a piece of cloth, generally one with personal

significance, that they will weave onto a circular mesh structure meant

to symbolize what McManigal calls the “sacred circle” of Mother Earth.

The weaving and tying together of fabrics in various shapes, sizes,

colors and textures symbolizes man’s potential to come together to

peacefully share our planet.

“Mine’s part of my blanket at home,” said 7-year-old Samantha Archie,

clutching a strip of white flannel material with little pink bunnies on

it.

Samantha took that piece of her childhood and tied it to those of her

classmates.

“This matches my home,” 6-year-old Esme Campos said with a huge grin

as she held out a swatch of cream-colored fabric with a chocolate brown

design on it.

The project began in 1987 before the end of the Cold War, McManigal

said, when she created a painting titled “Peace For Our Children.”

That painting, in 1989, was presented to future Nobel Peace Prize

winner Mikhail Gorbachev.

“When that happened, I realized that whatever you dream can happen,”

the artist told the children.

It was then that she became an “artist for peace,” she said, and began

this global art project to be created in the new millennium.

Since then, she has traveled extensively, finally returning to the

very school where she attended kindergarten.

Among the students and their parents Friday morning were Nadia Lepive

and her 7-year-old daughter, Masha. Lepive and her husband, who are from

the Ukraine in the former Soviet Union, left their native land before the

Berlin Wall fell to find a better life, she said.

“It’s just very meaningful and special to me because now my daughter

is tying up a cloth to the project that started back in Russia,” Lepive

said.

Children in Newport will continue to add to the art project that

stands in the school’s quad for several months. It will eventually leave

the school to be woven to the fabric of the Nagaro aboriginal tribe in

Australia, and countless others.

Where the project may stop, if it ever does, even McManigal cannot

say. But she hopes it will continue as a symbol of peace for children to

come.