NEW YORK, NY.- CITYarts will mark its 41st Anniversary of “Making a Difference Through the Arts” by celebrating A Year of Peace and honoring three extraordinary global women leaders: Louise Bourgeois, internationally acclaimed artist; Lisa Dennison, Chairman of Sotheby’s North and South America and former Director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and Her Highness Sheikha Manal bint Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, President of Dubai Women Establishment, and Wife of His Highness Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Minister of Presidential Affairs, UAE, patron and supporter of women in the arts.

The celebration will be launched at CITYarts’ Annual Benefit, Auction, and Awards Ceremony on Monday, May 18, 2009 from 6:30 to 9:30 pm at Sotheby’s.

By thinking globally and acting locally, CITYarts has engaged more than 100,000 New York City children and youth in the design and creation of large-scale public works of art. This year’s honorees exemplify CITYarts’ mission to build bridges of understanding among youth from divergent cultures and backgrounds through participation in the arts: Many outstanding artists who have supported CITYarts will be contributing their works for the benefit auction at Sotheby’s. These include Christo and Jeanne-Claude, William Wegman, Jessica Diamond, Nayland Blake, Peter Sis, Jenny Holzer, and many others, including artists from Dubai. Louise Bourgeois will be featured in a clip from a film produced by Amei Wallach.

In celebration of this momentous event, CITYarts plans to exhibit a selection of works from our flagship project begun in 2002, Pieces for Peace with Youth from Around the World. This ongoing, international project is designed to build bridges of cultural understanding by bringing American youth and their peers from around the globe into contact and in dialogue with each other and with society as a whole. Pieces for Peace participants design and create 6"x6" artworks that incorporate drawings, paintings, and poems. Many of these artworks have been incorporated into a permanent, large-scale outdoor mosaic in Harlem, New York City, completed in 2005 and undergoing a full restoration this upcoming summer. A traveling exhibition, which features 265 pieces of submitted student work and documentation of the mosaic wall process, has been shown in various locations in New York City, as well as in Egypt, Germany, and Spain. The exhibition will travel to the European Union Parliament building in Brussels in the fall of 2009.

“CITYarts is proud to celebrate 40 years of incredible collaborations between artists and young people, which have transformed communities and impacted lives,” says Tsipi Ben-Haim, Executive & Artistic Director of CITYarts. ”We believe that our projects encourage our youth to become active participants in shaping their communities and their futures.”