EARLY YEARS

Art Refuge was originally conceived as an afterschool painting club at Tibetan Homes Foundation in Mussoorie, India in 1994. Sarah Lukas, then president of Friends of Tibetan Women's Association, an NGO supporting Tibetan refugees in India, worked with the school’s director and painting instructor to set up a voluntary art programme for students there. These exiled children had left their Tibetan homeland to study at schools in India run by the Tibetan government-in-exile. Sarah encouraged them to paint about their personal experiences of the dangerous journey out of Tibet, life in India, Tibet as they remembered it, or anything they wished.
 
The programme soon expanded to the Reception Centre for New Arrivals in Kathmandu, Nepal where the children first connected with the Tibetan government-in-exile. They would then be bussed to the Reception Centre in Dharamsala, India. Some had trekked through high-altitude blizzards, experiencing snow blindness, frostbite and hunger, or been chased and shot at by border patrols. They missed their families and homeland. They were unsure of what lay ahead in India. In both locations the children waited sometimes weeks to be processed and placed in appropriate schools in India where they could receive a traditional Tibetan education.
 
Programme director and photographer Kitty Leaken and art teacher Mira Speare brought art and other supplies to the classrooms. Encouraged by His Holiness the Dalai Lama's enthusiasm for the project, Tibetan staff were hired in both locations and dedicated rooms were officially secured for the children to drop their guard and be gently guided in creative play.

Ama Adhe came on board to oversee Art Refuge in Dharamsala. She was a Tibetan national heroine who had spent twenty-seven years in Chinese prison for organising an underground women's resistance movement. After escaping to India, she had been granted permanent quarters on the top floor of the Reception Centre in honour of her work for Tibetan independence. Her harrowing biography was published in 1997 with its Foreword by the Dalai Lama: The Voice That Remembers – The Heroic Story of a Woman's Fight to Free Tibet. It raised international consciousness in opposing the occupation of Tibet. She welcomed the children to the Reception Centre with her calming presence and compassion for their hardships. 
 

Paintings from Art Refuge were featured in a widely travelled exhibit, At Home Away From Home: Tibet in Exile, that originated at the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Depicting life in Tibet, the perilous journey out and life at school in India, the images and stories of the young artists were also included in a film, Dance of Young Nomads, and a book, Art of Exile: Paintings by Tibetan Children in India.
 
Kitty Leaken, AR Programme Director, 1995-2006 (edited from original text. May 2026)