The Global Art Project for Peace

Students at Suncity School in Gurgaon, India, with art created for the Global Art Project for Peace exchange.

Katherine Josten

Join in a multicultural celebration of global peace and goodwill through art! In March and April 2024, Global Art Project for Peace (GAPfP) participants will create and exchange art expressing their ideas of a peaceful global community—resulting in thousands of messages of peace and goodwill simultaneously encircling the Earth during the week of April 23–30, 2024.

Nominated for a UNESCO Prize for the Promotion of Tolerance and Non-Violence, GAPfP has had 165,000 participants in 97 countries on seven continents since the first exchange in 1994. Schools around the world have participated, involving thousands of students from kindergarten through graduate programs.

Our Mission
GAPfP is a 501(c)3 nonprofit volunteer organization. Our mission is to joyously create a culture of peace through art. The project celebrates diversity and multiculturalism while expressing the idea that we are all one.

The Global Art Project for Peace celebrates diversity and multiculturalism while expressing the idea that we are all one.

The project gives participants in local communities an opportunity to join together to create a cooperative global community. It’s an opportunity for your students to join their energy with others to seed the future with visions of peace.

How It Works
Participants create a work of art in any medium, expressing their vision of global peace and goodwill. The art is displayed locally in each participant’s community. (Schools often display student art in the halls or library.) GAPfP then organizes an international exchange by matching participants—group-to-group and individual-to-individual. The exchange occurs every two years from April 23–30. The art is sent as a gift of global friendship and kept by the receiving participant.

Participants may send documentation of the art created and of the people who collaborated to the Global Art Project Art Bank. Galleries on our website are used as teaching tools in classrooms, giving students an opportunity to experience visions of peace and unity created by individuals from diverse cultures around the world. Posters with inspiring images of peace created by past participants may be downloaded for free from our website to display in classrooms.

Registration Is Open!
For thirty years, GAPfP has been dedicated to the idea that peace cannot be kept by force. It can only be achieved through understanding. Two hundred regional coordinators are helping to spread the word and organize GAPfP activities and exhibitions in their part of the world.

GAPfP gives students an opportunity to see themselves as part of a worldwide community, to think about how they’d like the world and their future to be, to know that they can make a difference, and to take action by creating and sharing their personal vision of peace.

Registration for the 2024 exchange is open! For details about how to participate, volunteer, or fund the project, visit globalartproject.org.

2024 GAPfP Timeline
February 29: Registration deadline. 
March: Create art expressing global peace.
April 1–22: Exhibit/perform your art locally.
April 23–30: Exchange your art with your GAPfP partner.
After April: Community exhibitions of art received.

Katherine Josten is an artist, educator, and founder/director of the Global Art Project for Peace, based in Tucson, Arizona.