2 New Yorker artists bring colours, smiles to Rohingya camps
KUTUPALONG, Bangladesh — With his blond dreads tied in a ponytail and baggy jeans caked with paint smudges, Max Frieder first arrived at the cramped Rohingya refugee camps last December. Unlike many other foreigners, he wasn’t an aid worker in one of the biggest camps for Myanmar’s persecuted minority in southern Bangladesh.
His mission: bringing colour and art to one of the most dismal places in the world.
Amid the sea of makeshift bamboo-and-tarp shelters dotting the rolling hills of Kutupalong, some huts are now painted over with colorful murals. Each mural is a collection of stories from the lives of Rohingya refugees and their hopes for the future.
Frieder and his partner Joel Bergner run a public art organization called Artolution. They’ve made hundreds of large-scale murals around the world, particularly with communities living in conflict zones, from Syrian refugee camps in Jordan and Lebanon to the Gaza Strip and Israel.