Joan Hanley/Hari Kirin Kaur Khalsa & Susan Quaglia Brown C

Title: Mud Mural

Location: Main Street, Wilton, New Hampshire

One evening we met in a lot downtown to make a spectacle about peace. We shined the headlights of our cars on the students in front of a brick wall and they traced their shadows. The next morning we applied mud inside the tracing with our hands. People responded. A passing stranger sent us 5 pizzas as we were completing the mural. The local press put the mural on the front page of the paper. Graffiti continues to appear on the other wall in the lot but not on the Mud Mural.

Hari Kirin Kaur Khalsa/Joan Hanley has been a professional artist since finishing her BFA at Hartford Art School in 1976. Her twenties were spent between NY, at the School of Visual Arts or Columbia University, and Hartford, CT, where she participated in Real Art Ways. During this time she met her spiritual mentor, Mahan Tantric, Yogi Bhajan. In 1986 she moved to Cambridge MA to pursue her interest in art, healing and spirituality. In 1988 She received an MA in Creative Arts Therapies from Lesley University. At Lesley she was deeply influenced by psychologist James Hillman and writer Thomas Moore's ideas about images. She began exploring these ideas in her painting, collaborative group performances, and therapeutic art events. She returned to graduate school and received an MFA degree from Vermont College in 2001. Her Faculty advisor, Steve Kurtz (CAE) described her thesis as "a brilliant, articulate document that clearly explains what constitutes the public sphere and how contestational cultural issues within this sphere can be addressed".

Recent Public installations include Office Hours, 360 oil paintings in the Dublin Ireland Immigration office, The Flag Project, a community expression of diversity in the State Legislature in Concord NH, Axis Mundi, a 40 day meditation with local teens on a toxic site in Wilton NH and MudMural, a collaborative organic Mural. Hari Kirin has shown her paintings in one-woman shows at The Mariposa Museum, NH and The Open Center NY and Group shows in the Attleboro Museum MA and Liberty gallery Dublin Ireland. Her work has been reviewed in CIRCA, Resurgence and Aquarian Times. Recent lectures include the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Hofstra University, and the One Earth conference. She has been a visiting professor of Contemporary Art History at Marlboro College VT, and an artist teacher for Vermont College and Maine College of Art MFA programs.

Hari Kirin lives in New Hampshire with writer Thomas Moore and their two children.

In 2007 She took Sikh vows and changed her name from Joan Hanley to Hari Kirin Kaur Khalsa.

Susan Quaglia Brown was born in Richmond Indiana. Studying unconventionally, Susan spent several years (1975-1983) traveling in the U.S., Mexico, and the Caribbean, painting, sailing and absorbing other cultures. Earning her BA from Vermont College, with a concentration in painting, Susan primarily is self-taught. Says art dealer, A.C.K. of O.K. Harris Gallery NYC, about Susan's paintings, "singular and fully-accomplished."

Reconciling art, environment, meditation, and collaboration, and bringing transformational events and installations for peace to NYC, and throughout New England, has culminated in site-specific spectacles in museums, galleries, and civic and government spaces - both indoors and out. Collaborating with Hari Kirin/Joan Hanley for 10 years (1999-present) includes the following site-specific installations: Puzzle Piece for The Rivier College Center for Peace and Social Justice; The Flag Project, a local and statewide traveling community collaboration culminating at the Attleboro Museum; Meditation in the Windows, a community meditation event, in Main Street storefront windows, sitting in stillness on 911; and Axis Mundi, a 40-day environmental site specific event, bringing together artists, educators, and students.

Teaching includes: Nashua NH Arts & Science Center, Women's Caucus for Art Seminar at Yale University, and High Mowing School, Wilton NH (2000-present.) Traveling, teaching and practicing Kundalini Yoga, and exhibiting her paintings all inform the site-specific collaborations and installations.

Susan lives in New Hampshire with her husband and two children.

"In her collaborations and public installation works, Susan Q. Brown has the rare ability to infuse the political with the personal so effectively that one feels as is they've become an honorary partner in a unique relationship of two, as well as a member of a lively, intelligent community of countless others, from ancient to postmodern, all reaching beyond themselves toward some intricately imagined bright future-- which is also, of course, right now. Her innate humor, intelligence and sheer affection for all sentient beings warms and inspires us and reminds us of the essential potency of imagination and the transformational possibilities of creativity, a power which truly belongs at the center of each of our lives at all times," writes colleague and installation artist, Susan Prince Thompson.