Camila Rios
Staff Writer
The University of La Verne held a posters exhibit in the West Gallery on Monday for International Peace Day commemorating the atomic bombing that occurred in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.
The Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum donated 30 posters to this exhibition with the only condition being that the posters be used in a gallery shared with the community.
“My lifelong goal is to become an advocate of the Peace Club to make sure that nobody will ever have to suffer from nuclear weapons or radiation sickness ever again,” said project director and exhibit curator, professor of modern languages Gloria Montebruno.
Montebruno has a couple different purposes for deciding to take on this project.
“I wish to make my students agents of change and peace,” Montebruno said.
“It is extremely important to raise awareness in the younger generations.”
After visiting the Hiroshima museum in Japan, many aspects of this tragic event became inspiring to those who contributed to the exhibit.
“What really struck me was how out of all this destruction came a lesson about peace and about what we don’t want to happen with nuclear weapons,” said senior international business major and project director assistant Alyssa Songco.
To make this exhibit possible, it required the contribution and help of many people, including several faculty members from the University.
“I, along with my master’s students, work with children and their families in hospitals who have been affected by radiation sickness,” said program chair and professor of the master’s in child life program, Leslie Young.
“We create cranes to give to the children, which are a symbol of hope and peace in the Japanese culture.”
Young gave a personal donation to the exhibit because of her strong feelings towards this subject, and because she wanted to try her best to honor the culture of her Japanese students who are involved in her master’s program.
There were a variety of different posters in the gallery.
One of the more powerful posters at the exhibit was the A-Bomb Drawings poster, which were sketches by the survivors of the unforgettable horrors that occurred.
“I feel the strongest about the ‘A-Bomb Drawings’ posters because of what it represents,” said master’s student in the child life program Akane Kurosaki.
“Even though the poster is not an actual live picture, the message that it gives off is just as powerful because of how it captures the moments of the event.”
Emotions ran high during the event as the audience and organizers of the exhibit reminisced over the incident that occurred in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
“It’s not really about whose fault it is, but more about what can we learn from these events that occurred in order to prevent them from ever happening again,” Songco said.
Camila Rios can be reached at camila.riosgomez@laverne.edu.
