Since 2003, violence in Sudan’s Darfur region has forced hundreds of thousands of Sudanese people to escape across the border to neighboring Chad. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), by late 2004 approximately 230,000 Sudanese refugees were living in 12 UNHCR refugee camps across eastern Chad.

In response to the humanitarian needs of Sudanese refugees, Pamela Sukhum, an internationally acclaimed painter, and Infinite Vision Foundation Co Founder Jeff Bauer launched the Beautiful Project in early 2006. The Beautiful Project was founded upon the belief that art—creative expression—can be a healing and transformative force for refugee children. It offers opportunities for children to express, integrate, and transform their experiences. In addition, the Beautiful Project offers the chance for refugee children to remind themselves and the world, through their artistic creations, that they are full human beings, not just bodies to be fed and given medical supplies.

With the support of the UNHCR, Sukhum and Bauer journeyed, in fall 2006, to the Gaga refugee camp in Chad, which then accommodated approximately 13,000 Sudanese refugees. They worked with 60 children and young adults between the ages of 5 and 20, from five different tribes and all six camp schools. The children engaged in a variety of artistic exercises aimed at both expressing what they had seen and experienced during the armed conflict in the Sudan; and healing from those experiences by transforming them through the discovery of their own creative voices and visions.

The impact of the Beautiful Project was immediate and profoundly positive. This is reflected in the children’s artwork, a news crew’s video documentary, and an invitation by the UNHCR for the expansion of the project to additional camps in eastern Chad. Sukhum and Bauer’s work with Sudanese children affirmed for them and Chad’s UNHCR staff the need to continue to move beyond the primary elements of survival—food, water, shelter, and physical health—in the work of refugee camps in Chad.

In March 2007, the Infinite Vision Foundation unveiled images created by the children over the course of the Beautiful Project at Art Expo New York, the preeminent fine art exhibition in North America, where they were view by thousands of people.

The Infinite Vision Foundation is currently expanding the Beautiful Project to reach as many of Darfur’s child refugees as possible.

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