Who We Are

ADVISORY COMMITTEE

Howard Ben Tré
Artist, Internationally recognized for his object sculpture and public art installations of large-scale cast glass. http://www.bentre.com/sitepage.cfm

David Karoff
Past Vice President of Grantmaking at The Rhode Island Foundation. Former leader of the RI Commission for National and Community Service, David Karoff also has served as Executive Director for the Rhode Island nonprofits SWAP (Stop Wasting Abandoned Property) and Thresholds, Inc., the latter of which created housing for persons with serious mental illness. He earlier served with the Peace Corps in Cameroon and has a degree in psychology from Dartmouth College.

Bernard LaFayette, Jr., Ed.D.
Currently establishing nonviolence centers world wide, Dr. LaFayette was appointed national program director for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the Coordinator of the 1968 Poor People’s Campaign by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Dr. LaFayette also co-founded the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in 1960. During the early period of the Civil Rights movement, he also directed Freedom Ride buses, voter registration in Alabama, and worked for housing rights with Dr. King in Chicago. Dr. Lafayette served as a mediator at Wounded Knee, S.D. to resolve the conflict between the U.S. Government and the Sioux Nation. He also helped prepare elections in South Africa. Distinguished Scholar-in-Residence and director of the Center for Nonviolence and Peace Studies at the University of Rhode Island.
He earned a doctorate in education from Harvard University. Dr. LaFayette is working towards making Rhode Island the first non-violent state in the U.S. In addition, Dr. LaFayette has served as Director of Peace and Justice in Latin America; Chairperson of the Consortium on Peace Research, Education and Development; Director of the PUSH Excel Institute; and minister of the Westminster Presbyterian Church in Tuskegee, Alabama. For more info:
http://www.uri.edu/nonviolence/about.html

Lynne McCormack
Director of City of Providence Department of Arts, Culture, and Tourism.

Dr. William L. Ury
William L. Ury is one of the world’s leading negotiation specialists and Director of the Project on Preventing War at the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School. Co-founder of Harvard’s Program on Negotiation, he has mediated situations ranging from corporate mergers to wild cat strikes in a Kentucky coalmine, and from family feuds to ethnic wars in Russia and the former Yugoslavia and more recently with the Chavez presidency in Venezuela. He is the co-author of the best-selling Getting to Yes (Penguin) and author of Getting Past No, and Getting To Peace. He is editor and a contributor of Must We Fight? From the Battlefield to the Schoolyard-A New Perspective on Violent Conflict and Its Prevention (Jossey-Bass). His books have together sold more than four million copies. An advocate of The Third Side, a proven model for ending conflict that shows how to mobilize communities to stop and, in some cases, prevent individual and group violence, Ury and his work have been featured in The New York Times, Newsweek and on ABC’s Good Morning America. He currently teaches at the University of Colorado. A newly created web site, thirdside.org is designed to stimulate discussion of the ideas in these books. He received his BA from Yale and Ph.D. from Harvard in social anthropology

Attorney Malcolm Farmer III
Volunteered for the Lawyers Constitution Defense Committee and the ACLU in the 1960s, moving to Mississippi to represent civil rights advocates. A lifelong supporter of civil rights, Farmer is currently a partner at Hinckley, Allen & Snyder LLP.

STAFF

Anne ” Ahni” Rocheleau, Founder and Director

Conceptual sculptor, painter, curator, poet Ahni Rocheleau concentrates primarily on object sculpture and installation. She explores through her art our culture’s relationship to constructions of otherness, reflecting on the human experience in time of war, often evoking loss, renewal, and rebalancing. Rocheleau received an MFA in sculpture from the Rhode Island School of Design and studied painting with Oliver Jackson at California State University. She has shown at Amos Eno Gallery in New York, the Richard R. Nelson Gallery at the University of California in Davis, and internationally including Canada, Medellin Colombia, Barcelona Spain, and Dortmund Germany.

Awards include the Walter Hopps (Director of the Menil Collection) Recognition of Merit Award for the Contemporary Arts Center, a DeWitt-Wallace Reader’s Digest Foundation Fellowship, Residencies at the Edna St. Vincent Millay Colony, UCross Foundation, two Rhode Island State Council on the Arts Grants and four International Convergence Festival Commissions, one for the International Sculpture Conference, and two Rhode Island State Council on the Arts Grants.

For over twenty years, Rocheleau has worked as an arts educator, curator, and arts administrator in the non-profit, foundation, museum, academic, and government worlds, including founding the visionary art organization Spaces For Peace. She was Director of The Rhode Island Foundation Art Gallery; taught “Monuments to Peace/ Addressing War and Violence” at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD); taught with the RISD Museum of Art; the University of Connecticut; Providence College; and directed art programs at the Langston Hughes Center for the Arts, CityArts for Youth, and the maximum security prison known as the Vacaville Medical Facility. She was trained in nonviolence under American civil rights leader Dr. Bernard LaFayette, Jr. at the University of Rhode Island Institute, and also with the Institute for the Study and Practice of Nonviolence in Providence, Rhode Island.

Lowell Reiland, Project Design Associate

Lowell brings to Spaces For Peace his lifelong sculptural explorations of a universal, positive outlook. His sculptural work juxtaposes formal organic elements within geometric forms through the exploration of divisions and fractals: timeless classical and romantic expressions within the same moment.Mr. Reiland received an MFA Sculpture degree from Cornell University. In addition to a two-year residency at Pulpit Rock Artists Community in Woodstock, Connecticut, Mr. Reiland has received an American Academy and Institute of Arts & Letters award, two Pollack/Krasner Foundation grants, support from Robert Rauschenberg foundation Change. Inc, and the Connecticut and New York State Arts Councils. Reiland was assistant to the late architectural site sculptor Richard Lippold. His work is in many art collections including that of the late Richard Brown Baker, Sumitomo Corporation of America, and the Sultan of Brunei.Presently, Lowell lives in Providence, Rhode Island after many years in Westerly, RI and Soho in New York City.