 . . . Summer 2000
CHILDREN OF WAR [CONT'D.] Paintings and color photographs by Lin Baum In 1990, she says, her Children of War Portrait Series "came full circle, when I proceeded to represent homeless children in Detroit," where she lives and works as a "traveling art teacher."
The Children of War series is Baum's attempt to personalize conflicts and traumas "that the adult world, consumed with vendettas" inflicts upon children. Children, she notes, are not just victims but even "targets of the war machines—and not only targets, but at times abducted into service as child soldiers. War, for me, is the ultimate form of massive child abuse."
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Two boys in West Belfast, Northern Ireland, 1987. 'They were living in a Catholic area so dangerous that the bus driver said he wouldn't even charge me for taking me there. British soldiers were everywhere in groups of three, training rifles on pedestrians. Helicopters hovered constantly overhead. You took your life in your hands if you absentmindedly carried a Catholic newspaper into a Protestant bar.'.