Project History

Break the Silence began in 1989, during the first Intifada (Uprising), when four Jewish American women artists were invited to the West Bank city of Ramallah to paint community murals with Palestinian community members and artists. Susan Greene, Miranda Bergman, Marlene Tobias and Dina Redman. BTS lived with a family in a refugee camp for 3 months and experienced firsthand what life was like under military occupation. BTS’s mission was to use culture to communicate what they learned to the American people. Upon returning to the U.S., BTS presented work and reflections to audiences in high schools, universities, art galleries and community centers across the country. BTS produced an award winning videotape and several articles were published in journals and books. As an extension of this original cultural project, BTS painted a mural about the occupation of Palestine, and Palestinians right to a homeland, that made connections with issues of “home” in San Francisco’s Mission District, traditionally a haven for refugees the world over.

BTS has returned to Palestine many times in the past 20 years completing more than a dozen community based collaborative public art projects, developed a website about the cartoon Handala and produced several art exhibits that explore exile and borders.

BTS’s year-round domestic community education and awareness building work is carried out through a combination of popular education workshops/presentations, mural projects, video projects, art exhibitions, website updates, house parties, community dialogues and arts trainings. BTS offers two workshops, in particular, on a regular basis to diverse audience in a wide variety of venues: “Art and Resistance” and “Focus on Gaza and the Wall”. All of BTS’s community presentations are dynamic, multi-media events that promote critical thinking skills and offer a window into the lives of Palestinian refugees, whose stories are largely unknown in the United States.

In the past 20 years the mission of BTS has developed to include a greater focus on the intersections between oppression of Palestinians and other oppressions around the world, particularly in the United States.

Currently BTS is working to integrate technology, new media and social networking developments into its work, with the goal of reaching more people on multiple levels.